But David lived, Lord, and I want to live too; I so want to live!
But just like Sampson, I am poised between two pillars, the one destined to bring the temple of the Philistines crumbling down.
And Sampson died, Lord.
But I don’t want to die, Lord, now that I’ve found the certainty of Your Love, and of a love here on Earth, which I’ve longed for all my life. Please don’t take these things from me now, Lord.
Behind us, a deep thud and a loud scream tell us that at least one of Lester’s booby traps has been laid out here, and there could be more. Cab turn, raising the rifle and firing again. I keep low, covering my ears as Cab searches his pockets.
“You have those shells?” he asks me. I shake my head. “Box must have fell out while we were running.” Cab shrugs, tosses the rifle away and takes my hand.
“We better move!”
As we scramble further down the slope, I ask, “Why throw the rifle away? They might be able to use it!”
“Only slowing us down. C’mon!” He pulls me further and faster, pushing branches out of his way as he clears a hasty trail. There’s a desperation to his movements now which frightens me, quivering in my gut and making my legs tremble.
We duck as the rifle fire increases behind us, popping and whizzing, smoke clinging to the air.
Cab grunts and stumbles, running a few more chaotic feet before tumbling to the ground. I stop and fall to my knees at his side.
“Cab?”
He grabs his arm, his shoulder already dark with blood, a charred bullet hole in the back of his jacket still leaking up little tufts of smoke.
“You’re shot!”
“Help me up!”
I try to pull him up, and his legs do the rest of the work; but he’s heavy, and I can already tell he’s lost a lot of strength to that shot to the shoulder. He winces in pain as I help him stand upright, his good arm around my shoulders. I lead him away, but our scramble has been turned into a halting gate as we inch our way toward the highway. I think I can hear the distant sound of a car passing, a vague whoosh that I want to think is a good omen, a sign that we just might make it after all.
“You two might as well give up now,” Jonah says from behind us. “It’s all over.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
We stop and turn to see Jonah walking toward us, holding a rifle at the ready, pointed right at me. Sebastian is there, his forehead still not quite healed from the blow I gave him.
And what looks like a dozen more men creep down behind them, all armed, snarling, and ready for the kill.
He says, “I really can’t believe yer still alive, missy. Another place, another time, I could have been your husband. Oh well ... ”
“Let’s skin the traitor alive,” Sebastian says, staring at Cab.
Jonah turns to Cab. “What do you think, boy? What’s a suitable punishment for betraying your own kind, your own people? We raised you up from a tyke, protected you and your momma, kept you out of the system, out of jail—”
“I never committed any crimes at all,” Cab says. “You manipulated my mother, and tolerated me. But I couldn’t live the way you people live, doing business with those biker gangs, selling those drugs, smuggling innocent women out to Lord knows who ... ”
“I ain’t admittin’ nothin’,” Jonah says as he cocks his rifle. “Don’t gotta, ‘cause all this mess stops right here.”
I ask Jonah, “How long do you think you can get away with this? We stumbled onto you, and then got away—”
“Almost got away,” Jonah corrects me.
“What about the next passersby, or the next? You’ll get found-out eventually.”
“Missy, folks wander in from time to time, and we have a steady flow of clients, so really we’re just like any other town in America; bit of a drug business, few secrets buried here and there, no bigs.”
“No bigs?” Cab repeats.
“And there’s no reason Westington can’t keep right on going on with business as usual, just like any other idyllic American town. Then, if we gotta overthrow the government, at least we’ll be ready.”
I repeat, “Overthrow the government?”
Jonah smiles. “That’s all for down the road, don’t you worry about that. S’lot further down the road than you two’ll ever get, I’m afraid.”
He raises his rife to his face and takes dead-aim, several others doing likewise. Those bullets will tear us to pieces, and we have no way to fight, no place to run and nowhere to hide.
We’re as good as dead.
I say, “Wait, wait a minute! Won’t you give us a last chance to ... say our prayers, at least? You may not have been a true believer, but I am!” He stares at me, considering. I add, “Where am I gonna run? What am I gonna do?”
Jonah looks around, then at his underlings behind him, then back at me. “Sorry,” he says. “Yer dead.”
The first shot rings out, echoing in my ears. But neither Cab nor I take a bullet. Instead, one of the younger men in Jonah’s party snaps back and falls to the ground, dropping his rifle. Jonah and the others turn to find the source of the gunshots, to their left and our right. More shots ring out.
Cab and I look over to see Lester Krebbs, standing with a rifle, legs astride, carefully pointing and shooting. I look back to see another of Jonah’s men snap back. In the other corner of my eye, Miriam bolts up from behind a tree, a rifle in her own hand. She starts shooting, a cloud of gun smoke gathering in front of her.
We’re stunned but helpless in this new and terrible gunfight. I feel something behind me and turn to see Stanley and Stonewall. Each grabs one of our hands and pulls us away from the gunfight. I look back to see Lester looking right at me. He nods, then turns to aim and fire at Jonah’s goons. I hear the Krebbs’ hound baying, growling, a man screaming and flailing in the muck nearby.
The boys pull us back up the ridge, trying to clear a path for us. Cab is getting heavier, his feet slipping out from under him.
“Hold on, Cab, stay with me. Not much further to go.”
The rifle shots continue behind us, the familiar sound of a car driving by fairly distant ahead of us. A few more minutes of retreat more and we hit the line where the woods meets the highway, a beautiful two-lane strip of concrete; civilization. Law.
Justice.
The boys let go and turn to ditch back into the woods.
“Boys,” I say, stopping them. They turn. I add, “Thank you.”
Stanley nods, but this time it is Stonewall who nudges him with his elbow. Stonewall gives me a little wink, then turns and leads his newly submissive twin back into the woods.
Cab is still leaning heavily on me, wincing with pain. I turn and start leading him down the highway. “C’mon, somebody’ll come by soon, you’ll see.”
“Yeah, we’ll be okay,” Cab manages to say as we turn, the road banking.
Dear Lord, I hear myself pray again. Don’t let him die! When I asked for my own life, my own safe passage, I didn’t mean at his expense! Lord, this would be too cruel! If one of us must die it should be me, not him! Please don’t let him die, Lord, not when we’re so close ... so close ...
But he’s getting weaker fast, heavier, and I know that if he doesn’t get to a hospital soon, he’ll bleed to death.
Is this the price of justice, Lord? Must there always be a sacrifice?
Jonah steps out of the woods behind us. “You two!” Startled, we turn.
Jonah stands on the side of the road, weaving on his feet. His rifle gone, he still holds two handguns, one in each hand. His gray shirt is stained black, a charred hole in the center of the seeping stain.
“Those hillbilly bastards shot me!” he says, almost surprised. “You sneaky devils!” He takes a few staggering steps toward us. “Gonna go back, kill them next.”
We step backward, Cab barely on his feet, my own legs getting tired struggling to keep us both upright. But neither of us has the strength to withstand a bullet shot at close range.
&nb
sp; Jonah staggers toward us, weaving to the side and almost falling back into the wooded slope. He over compensates, staggering further into the road just at the lip of that tight curve.
A blind curve.
Cab says, “You’ve had it, Jonah, you’re finished! You and your whole sick town are about to be wiped off the face of the map.”
“Yeah? Then I’m taking you with me!” Jonah raises both arms, guns pointed right at us.
Tires screech behind the bank, and Jonah is the first to turn toward the direction of the sound. Out of what seems like evil instinct, Jonah turns the guns toward the sound, and then what we can see is making it; an Indiana County Sheriff’s Department patrol car. It comes up fast, from out of nowhere.
Jonah doesn’t even have time to get off a shot before the skidding car smashes into him. He bends forward over the hood of the car and is then thrown away from it, backward through the air with his arms and legs splayed out, guns toppling out of his hands. He lands on the road with a hideous crack and a thick thud, a grunt that sounds like whatever it is that’s in his body being pushed out of it. If not quite a soul, in his case, an energy force of some kind. His body rolls to a stop on the concrete, his blank eyes staring up; lifeless, useless.
A mistake to be blotted out, wiped forever from the face of the Earth.
I think of Romans 1:18 as we look at that stunted, twisted thing that lay prostrate in the dust. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
None other than Deputy Karras climbs out of his car, a vaguely familiar deputy, a female, with him. He says, “Bethany Zook!”
“Deputy Karras!”
He hurries to me, cautious of Cab but clearly aware of his injuries. “You’re shot,” he says. “How bad?”
“Not good,” Cab says, “lost a lot of blood.”
Deputy Karras turns to his fellow officer, who scurries back to their car. “Call it in!”
“On it!”
I ask, “What’re you doing out here?”
“In the area, responding to a call of shots fired. What are you doing out here?”
I look around, gunfire no longer ringing in the distance. “Can’t talk, gotta get Cab to a hospital.”
“Ambulance is on the way, backup’s already combing that hill. You’re safe now, Bethany.” The words don’t bring me any warmth as I see the pale complexion of Cab’s face, his head lolling tiredly on my shoulder. Deputy Karras rushes up to me and takes Cab’s weight, leading him to the backseat of the patrol car.
That’s when I feel Jonah’s icy grip around my ankle, his fingers digging into my skin. It sends a trembling of fear racing straight up my leg, exploding in my heart. I scream, but he holds tight as I try to yank my ankle away. Finally, his fingers relent and my ankle comes loose. I stagger back with a terrified sob as Deputy Karras runs over to Jonah’s body. He puts the backs of two fingers to Jonah’s neck, then steps away.
“Death throws, probably. He’s gone now.”
I fall into Deputy Karras’ arms as the ambulance siren gets louder, the flashing lights casting a panicking glow over the trees even during the day. I fall to the side of the patrol car, near the opened rear passenger door, where Cab sits, slumped over.
I hold his hand. “Stay with me, Cab, stay with me! Please don’t die!” He opens his mouth as if he’s trying to speak, but he only nods. “Okay, save your strength, Cab ... please ... ” I don’t even realize the ambulance has stopped until one paramedic is easing me aside. The other has a cart with a lot of equipment already unloaded from the opened rear doors. A third man readies the gurney.
Deputy Karras eases me back, his arms around my shoulders. He says, in a voice very low and calm, “They’ll do everything they can, it’s out of our hands now.”
And I realize Yes, of course it is. It’s in God’s hands now. We’ve done our part, we’ve paid the price of redemption.
It is completed.
***
The next day is a blur. Cab recovers in a private hospital room, and I remain by his side, armed guards in front of the closed door. Meanwhile, Deputy Karras leads the whole of the Sheriff’s Department, plus other federal law enforcement agencies, in a massive raid on Westington.
Jonah and several others are dead, and a lot of Westington’s best men were trapped or taken in the woods during our flight from the Krebbs’ shack. So, there isn’t too much of a fight when the authorities arrive in their line of patrol cars, several buses, and half-a-dozen helicopters.
There is a good amount of gunfire around the brewery / meth lab, and I hear that one of the helicopters was shot down and the two law enforcement officers inside killed. But the lab is destroyed in a thunderous explosion, probably set off by old man Barnard Justice himself to destroy the evidence. However, all those explosions and gunfights do little to prevent his arrest.
Some of the town’s denizens are said to have escaped into the woods, and after a few days of tracking almost two dozen are captured. But everybody speculates that several others probably have escaped with their lives.
“Thing is,” Deputy Karras says to me and Cab, “a town like that, no real records on file as to who lived there or for how long, almost every name’s a fake, or stolen from a dead person in some other state. It’s a mess that’ll take years to get through.”
“So there are people out there who might still want to hurt us?” I ask.
“Could be. But look, it’s a big country, and any Westington refugees are likely to be worrying about saving their own necks, not coming after yours. They’ll be happy to lay low and not get caught, start new someplace else. They’ll be lucky to get out of those woods alive, not be grabbed up by a bear or hillbillies or something. Speaking of that, you didn’t see any trace of anyone while you were out there?”
Now, of course I hate to lie to this man, who has saved my life more than once. But Lester Krebbs and his family willingly risked their own lives, their own liberty, and their own family, everything in their world, to help me.
I cannot betray them now.
I ask, “You didn’t find any ... bodies that might give you that impression?”
Deputy Karras looks deep into my eyes, then leans back and shakes his head. “Deputies heard a dog in the area, but we didn’t find one. You don’t know anything about that either, I suppose?”
Cab and I share a quick glance, then shake our heads and keep our lips shut.
And nobody they bring back from Westington is going to get too involved in the details of when Cab left to come find me. Knowing this, Cab says to Deputy Karras, “Like I said, I ran away from Westington the very day of Bethany’s escape, and tracked her down, found her barely alive. I was afraid to drag her through the mountains by myself, thought she might have a broken back or something.”
“So you hunted and foraged and nursed her back to health?”
“That’s right,” I say. “We were hiding in case those Westington goons came after us. And as you know, they finally did.”
“But by then you’d regained your strength enough to hike up to the highway?”
We both nod, reassured that a greater good, the Krebbs’ safety and reward for their sacrifice, is worth the price of a little white lie.
Even if Deputy Karras didn’t quite believe it, he let it go. He is ready to move on to other points of interest, and so are we; until we realize what those points are.
“So, during the raid on Westington,” Deputy Karras says, “we ... found evidence of homicide.” After a tense little silence, he adds, “A body.” I swallow hard, knowing what he’s going to say next. “It was your father’s body. I’m sorry, Bethany.”
Cab, sitting next to me, reaches over and puts his hand on mine.
I say, “Where is he now?”
Deputy Karras answers, “We’ve retrieved the ... what kind of arrangements would you like us to make?”
“We ... we need to bury him with Ma
mm and Margaret, here in Smicksberg. We should bring Aunt Sarah in too, from Somerset. The family should all be together.”
“Well, not all of them,” Cab says.
I say to Deputy Karras, “I’ll ask my friend Greta to help organize the funerals. I suppose we can combine them into one service for the whole community. Not sure how many will show up after the way they treated us before we left.”
Deputy Karras says, “Well, first of all, since you’ve been gone, everybody’s been talking about how badly they felt, how they wish they’d treated you better; at least the few that I’ve talked to.”
“Really?”
“Plus you’re a national hero now. You’ve brought down a massive criminal empire, Bethany, you both have. You’re gonna be swarmed with reporters, TV interviews, you’ll be on every magazine cover in the free world!”
“But I don’t want that,” I say. “Can’t you stop that from happening?”
Deputy Karras says, “Really? But you’re a hero for your entire people, or race ... your Order, I meant to say. Westington was a blight on the reputation of every Amish community everywhere. They’re all in your debt!”
“No,” I say, “they owe me nothing. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”
“That’s very true, Bethany. But, y’know, you’d be setting a great example for other young people, of your community and in other walks of life.”
“Please,” I say, “we just want to be left alone.”
“We?” Deputy Karras repeats.
I look over, Cab squeezing my hand in his. “Yes,” I say softly, “we.”
Deputy Karras nods, jotting notes onto a little pad. “And what exactly are you two thinking of, after your business here is settled up? If you’re looking for a town where you’ll be welcomed, a place where you can live in peace, safely in the arms of ... the Order, right?”
I nod, turning to Cab. “What do you think? I never wanted to leave Smicksberg, not really.”
Cab shrugs. “Seems like a nice enough place. If you’re happy, that’s all I care about.”
I’m glad to hear that, especially because I know what I have to say next. “Y’know, Cab, if we’re going to be ... together, it means getting married. I don’t mean to rush you, after all we’ve been through—”
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