The Waking Dark

by Robin Wasserman

  Grace swung the door wide and ushered them in, letting them babble, pretending to listen, trying not to smile. If her father wanted her to do it yourself, he could hardly have made it easier for her to try.

  13

  THE WAGES OF SIN

  They slept well that night, though none of them expected to. Grace felt the drowsiness take her while they were all still huddled in the living room, telling their confusing tale. Deciding that killing Cass would be all the sweeter once she’d opened her eyes and could see death on its way, Grace allowed the football player to carry her up to her bedroom, where she hadn’t slept since the storm, but slept now, hard and deep, dreaming of blood.

  Daniel fell asleep curled around Milo, lulled by the steady rise and fall of the boy’s chest, and the way he smiled as his eyelids fluttered, as if he were dreaming them into a better day.

  West dreamed of Nick, and though he told the phantom You’re not real, he let the thin arms curl around him and the lips press to his bruised cheek and thought that maybe it would be all right to lose the fight, to die, if death would be like this.

  Only Jule thought of Ellie as she closed her eyes and tucked her knees to her chest, wondering at the girl’s transformation in the woods, at her history with Baz, at her determination not just to save Jule and Cass, but to put herself in their place. And she resolved, the next morning, to repay the favor. Maybe she couldn’t save the town; maybe she couldn’t even save herself. But she could at least do what she had to do to find Ellie. I don’t believe in you, Jule thought, but she does. So watch out for her. It was the decision about what she would do in the morning that finally let her give in to sleep. She dreamed of Baz, and her right hand twitched, reaching for an invisible knife.

  They would not have slept, if they had known.

  The deacon kept Ellie safe, as he’d promised. Long enough to spirit her away from Baz and his Watchdogs; long enough to get her back to the center of town; long enough to rally the people of Oleander, who’d had their hearts set on a burning, and would take what they could get.

  They could not get the killer they’d been promised – not that day.

  But they could get a fallen saint. A false prophet. Judged guilty, by public acclamation, of fraud and sacrilege, of making fools of the townspeople and dealing slanderous insults to the deacon. She had spoken so often of the need for cleansing, for purging the town of all sin before God struck again with His other fist. She had warned He would not hesitate to punish the many for the sins of the few. She was a liar, but in this, she spoke the truth. So said the deacon, so said the town.

  “Your sins will be forgiven,” Deacon Barnes had assured Ellie in the woods. He promised her so again under the moonlight, as the first stars cut through the dark, and she was bound to the pyre and delivered to her fate.

  The deacon yanked her hands behind her head and tied them to the post. Clair and Morgan bound her feet and rued that they had ever been her friend. The wind screamed, and it was Oleander, crying for her blood. It was Ellie, crying.

  She had always imagined there would be more dignity in martyrdom.

  She was not Joan of Arc; she was not Jesus. She was not stoic, and she was neither silent nor brave. She was seventeen years old, and she was about to be set on fire, and she wanted someone to hold her and tell her it was going to be all right.

  “The Lord will not abide false prophets,” the deacon shouted to the crowd. “We will not abide!”

  Ellie’s mouth was too dry for words. Please, her lips said, and God had no answer.

  “Oleander shall be purged of sin,” the deacon shouted. “And the purging shall begin here and now.”

  He beckoned her mother to the stage.

  No one knew the truth about Ellie King. Not her mother, who had read her diary; not Deacon Barnes, who had heard her confession, and promised to cleanse her sins. He could see her stain, but not its cause. Not the wound from which the tainted blood flowed.

  Only God saw that.

  God, and Ellie, every time she looked in the mirror.

  There had been a baby.

  In the time after Baz, after the night of the bucket and the bath, after she’d been cast out but before she’d been saved, there had been a baby. A month, first, of uncertainty and fear and secret vomiting in the deacon’s guest bathroom – all of which, she’d told herself, could be ascribed to the stress of her situation. Things happened when your body was under duress. Things could happen, and they could be innocent: your breasts could tenderize, your stomach could lose its sea legs, your cycle could upend itself, and you could ignore it all. Especially if you could believe that you had been careful with your calendar and believe that Baz had pulled out in time and believe that things like that didn’t happen to you.

  A fourteen-year-old in Oleander, Kansas, couldn’t easily acquire condoms without everyone knowing exactly what she was about to do, and a fourteen-year-old could, under no circumstances, acquire a home pregnancy test without everyone knowing exactly what she had become. Without a license, she couldn’t drive to a town where no one knew her name.

  She swiped a test from Gathers Drugs. She peed on the stick.

  She locked herself in her room – a half storeroom, half office in which the deacon had shoved an air mattress and copies of Prince Charming Is Worth the Wait and Protecting Your Purity: God’s Handbook for the Christian Teen. She stayed there for three days, and for three days, she fasted, and she cried. She dripped tears on the Bible, and found herself in Psalm 69: “When I weep and fast, I must endure scorn.”

  Abortion was out of the question.

  Abortion, she knew, from school and from church, was murder.

  She didn’t know whether she believed that, or whether she believed Ms. Jacobs, the absurdly young gym teacher who’d been very fond of the word choice, as in “Abortion is a safe and valid _.”

  It was not so in Oleander; it was not so for Ellie, who didn’t need the Internet to tell her that in a state with only one abortion provider and a parental-consent requirement, her choice was only: tell her mother she was having a baby, or wait for her mother to figure it out.

  She was having a baby.

  The deacon had told her that if she prayed, she would be saved.

  He told her that if she accepted Jesus into her heart, she would be saved.

  And so she prayed. Every morning and every night, every spare minute, on her knees, in church, in the bedroom that wasn’t her own, in the bathroom at school when no one was watching. Please, Jesus. Make it go away.

  The deacon said Jesus knew what was in her soul, and so He knew what it meant. He heard her prayer as it was intended:

  Please, Jesus. Kill my baby.

  And one day, the blood came, and with it a wrenching pain, and a loosening, and with a soft whimper and a flush of the toilet, she was saved.

  The deacon knew only that she’d given herself to the Lord, and he doused her in holy water, and celebrated, and she was welcomed back into her home with open arms. She dedicated herself to her new life. She scrubbed her soul. But the deacon had lied. Because all the soup kitchens and all the food drives in the world couldn’t wash away the stain.

  And now there was the voice, naming her sins.

  Filthy.

  Lustful.

  Baby killer.

  It knew her as no one else did, so how could she not believe it?

  “I don’t know if I can,” Ellie’s mother said as Ellie whimpered and screamed and begged her: “Please, no, Mommy, don’t.”

  The deacon pressed the lighter into her hand. “You can, and you must. It’s only right it be you. Her mother should save her.”

  Ellie’s mother turned the lighter slowly in her hands, seeming hypnotized by it. “She’s always made such a mess,” she told the deacon. “Children can’t help themselves, you know. Disgusting creatures.”

  The deacon patted her shoulder. “This is why they need us. To teach them.”

  “Yes,” she said. “This way she’
ll learn.”

  Ellie closed her eyes. It couldn’t be the last thing she saw: the deacon’s eyes, her mother’s smile. She closed her eyes, and the noise of the crowd dropped away, and she heard only the voice, except it was different now – no longer angry, no longer so gleefully knowing. It spoke not in her ears, but in her entire being, the words vibrating in her chest and head and heart. She knew it could be fear, or wishful thinking, or the drug, but it sounded like none of those. It sounded true.

  You have always been clean, it said.

  You have always been saved.

  She had time to hear her mother’s final goodbye – not I love you, not I’m sorry, but It has to be. She had time to wish that things had been otherwise, and she’d lived a different life. Or at least that she had lived this one with a friend. She found herself wishing, strangely, that Jule were by her side now, or Cassandra, or even the football player, Baz’s friend, the strange one she barely knew. She had time for the voice to tell her:

  You are not alone.

  She believed that, too.

  She had always believed less than people thought; she had believed less than she wanted to, though she had tried so hard. But she believed now. That He was here. That He was with her.

  That she was good.

  She took a deep breath, and believed that she was unstained and unbroken and deserved to live, and she had time to be happy before her mother’s hand lit the pyre, and the flames swallowed her up.

  14

  DEVIL TOWN

  The execution of Eleanor King was an unqualified success. So much so that, as the deacon had predicted, the town found itself hungry for more righteous cleansing. By the next morning, the Watchdogs joined with the Oleander police force and a posse of citizen volunteers to round up what undesirables they could. In a town of this size, everyone knew the deviants – confirmed and suspected. The lesbian librarian, the gay hippie with the organic tea business and his tow-truck driver boyfriend, the outspoken atheists, the criminals, the drug addicts, and the alcoholics (at least the sloppy, unpopular ones), not to mention the unfortunates whose only crime was landing at the wrong end of a petty grudge or a bad business deal. Once the roundups began, it didn’t take a genius to realize their efficacy in getting inconvenient colleagues out of the way.

  Only those with known arsenals (and hair triggers) were spared. Which left the Prevettes and the Preacher unmolested, but everyone else was fair game. Baz and the Watchdogs contributed a list of younger residents who’d already showed signs of deviance and dissent. The primary sign, as it happened, was exhibiting disrespect for Baz and the Watchdogs and their sport of choice.

  By midafternoon, the righteousness brigade had rounded up more than thirty people, ages fifteen through seventy-seven (the latter being James Priest, who, before retiring, had spent his career foreclosing on farms with just a little too much joy). They were dragged out of their homes, down their streets, and locked into an abandoned grocery store that would serve as a makeshift brig until something more suitable could be found. There was no consensus on what should be done with the deviants. The act of capture, the pleasure of taunting them once they’d been locked up, was enough for one day. Punishment could wait for the next.

  The mood in town was joyous. All concern about the quarantine or fear of what lay behind it had burned away in the righteous flames. As if waking from a dream, they discovered that isolation was a gift: the opportunity to create an empire of their own. Every home was a potential kingdom; every man, every woman a dictator, finally empowered to reshape life according to desire and whim.

  There were several homicides. Fights broke out on street corners at the slightest provocation. Those addicts who weren’t swept up in the purge drowned in the depths of their poison of choice. Long-simmering sexual tension erupted regardless of circumstance or setting; long-simmering rivalries, grudges held for decades, presented themselves for immediate resolution. There were duels; there were ambushes. And that night there was more than one person who went to sleep and wouldn’t wake up in the morning.

  The children noticed; children always notice. Their parents had turned into creatures who lacked impulse control and ignored responsibility, who took what they wanted and did as they pleased, and there were children who ended up bruised, or broken. There were children who were turned out of their homes – or were wise enough to run – and they prowled the streets, enjoying the novelty of adventure until the moon rose and the night cooled and they had no bed to return to. When that happened, wherever it happened, Laura Tanner was waiting. The beloved Miss Oleander, with her weapons and her willingness to do what was necessary to keep her children safe, the children who now belonged to her.

  This was the report that Grace brought back for her houseguests after a few hours of poking around the town. They heard very little after “the execution of Eleanor King.”

  They blamed themselves.

  It was her house, but Grace knew when she wasn’t wanted. They talked past her, as if she were a child – but then, that’s what they believed she was. It was why they trusted her, and so she allowed it.

  They barely noticed her, which meant no one thought anything of it when she slipped upstairs to sit in Cass’s room and wait for her to wake. They probably thought it was touching, evidence that she’d accepted their story and forgiven Cass. The poor, helpless, unwitting victim of her own uncontrollable actions.

  But Grace was, probably, under the control of this R8-G at that very moment, and she didn’t feel very unwitting. Her desires were her own. The drug was not the reason she wanted Cass to die. If it was the reason she was willing to make it happen, then score one for the evil scientists.

  Except that Cass was unconscious, and had been for thirteen hours, and still she lived. Grace could bring herself to do nothing until the older girl woke.

  She had to see it coming, Grace told herself. She had to know what was happening, and that Grace was the one responsible.

  Maybe.

  But the fact was, hours passed, Cass breathed, and Grace sat.

  Waiting.

  The safest time to leave was the middle of the night. But that wasn’t saying much. Which was why West didn’t tell anyone that he was going, or where. A day of sleep and talking in circles had brought them no closer to figuring out a plan for escape, other than risking another flight to the woods. If they made it that far, maybe they could scramble under the barbed wire and skirt the edges of the floodlights and somehow make it past the heavily guarded border and the twenty miles of prairie that lay beyond. It was a last-ditch, last-moment kind of plan, and they believed this to still be another day away.

  Somehow, the others slept. But West couldn’t close his eyes without seeing Ellie. He couldn’t stop thinking about his parents and whether they would be exterminated before they could be returned to their right mind. And he was afraid that sleep meant Nick would come – and more afraid that he would not. So he walked the night.

  The old grocery was under guard by twelve men, each carrying a rifle. Thanks to the boarded-up windows, there was no way of telling who lay inside. For all West knew, Jason was curled up comfortably in his own bed, dreaming of live music and dead bullies. But it seemed unlikely – and with Baz involved, it seemed impossible.

  West couldn’t get him out alone.

  Maybe Jason would be better off inside. If the whole town was infected, then maybe being locked up was the safest place for anyone to be. Until the “final containment” began, that is.

  If they could get out of town, if they could stop it, then everyone could be saved. If they couldn’t… then the town was as much prison as the grocery, and did geography really matter if they were all going to die?

  They were pretty rationalizations.

  If he’d still been at home, West thought, then his parents would have delivered him here. This he did not doubt. Did that give him some obligation to play savior? If he’d been spared by the grace of his heavenly Father (and the madness of his earthly
one), then should Jason and the rest be spared by the grace of West? In the morning, he promised himself. In the morning, if there was no better plan, no certain way to save the town or themselves, then he would rally these people who were somehow less and more than friends, and convince them to at least save someone. Or to try.

  Is that enough? he whispered. That’s all I have.

  Nick was silent. That night, he did not come. He never came again.

  “You sleeping?” Daniel asked, from his spot on the couch.

  Jule opened her eyes to darkness. “Not a chance. You?”