by K. M. Fawkes
“Get down,” the follower hissed, giving him a shove between the shoulder blades.
The stairs were slimy with moisture and Brad’s feet nearly slipped out from under him. He was still cuffed, so he couldn’t use his arms for balance. Descending into the cold dark was the hardest thing he’d done in a while.
What did it mean to be put down here? Was it just a holding cell until Aunt and Uncle could speak to him? Or would they simply close the door behind them and leave the two of them down here, letting them starve and then rot?
“What are you going to do with us?” Lee demanded.
Brad jumped. That was the first thing that his father had said since he’d threatened everyone holding him at the remains of the cabin. Brad saw his father’s eyes going over the dank cellar, bright and curious as he looked for weak points and ways out.
“We’re not going to do anything with you yet,” one of the men answered.
“Are you planning to just leave us down here?” Lee asked, wincing as another man un-cuffed him.
Brad had thought that Lee might swing for his captors, but he didn’t. He held himself still and waited for an answer. Brad realized that he was holding his breath as he waited as well.
“You’ll be trialled at dawn,” the man said as he un-cuffed Bradley.
“The hell does that mean?” Lee snapped.
But the man didn’t speak again. None of them did. Instead, they all turned and walked back up the steps. The only sound was the slamming of the cellar door.
Brad leaned against the wall, feeling the floor tilt under his feet as he fought his sudden rush of panic. Maybe it had been shock that had kept him so calm on the ride over. It had dissipated quickly at the mention of a trial.
He slid down the wall, resting his elbows on his knees as he dropped his head forward, putting his face in his hands. What kind of witch-hunt did they have planned out there tomorrow? And what would they do when Brad was inevitably found guilty? He’d killed followers of theirs, for God’s sake. There was no way that they were going to let him walk away with a warning.
“What are you doing sitting down?” Lee demanded. “You got us into this so get off your ass and help me look for a way out of here.”
Brad snorted. “I got us into this? Really? I did my best to talk you out of coming here!”
“You were the one who decided to start a pointless argument in the middle of a goddamn war zone!”
“It’s not my fault that you disappeared before I could yell at you for your bullshit twenty years ago,” Brad informed his father as he stood up. Anger had washed away the fear and he was more than ready to go for round two.
Lee took a step back and Brad enjoyed the hell out of the small concession.
“Just help me look,” Lee said, clearly trying to aim his tone toward casual.
“Do you really think that you’ll find one? I’ve deal with these people before. They might be crazy as bed bugs, but they’re thorough. We’re stuck here until the trial so you might as well sit down.”
“Maybe I’m not ready to give in,” Lee snarled. “But you never did have much of a backbone, did you?”
Brad felt his fists clench, but he allowed his father to turn and walk away. There was no point in doing anything that he would regret as seriously as decking his father. He wanted to die with as clear a conscious as he could.
As he Lee turned and began checking the edges of the ceiling, Brad heard a rustling noise in the darkest corner of the cellar. Suddenly a figure moved, gaining speed as it came toward him. His heartbeat ramped up as fear pumped adrenaline through him. He’d thought that they were alone.
Just as he braced himself to fight if he had to, the figure became clear. A woman, lean and lithe, wearing a ragged sweater and jeans.
It was impossible to see in the low lights, but he knew that red hair was flying out behind her from her speed. He matched it. Two steps forward was all it took for him to have Anna in his arms once again.
“Brad,” she whispered against his neck as she gripped him so tightly that her arms trembled. “Oh, my God, I’ve missed you so much.”
He pressed his face against her hair, simply breathing her in as they swayed together. “I missed you too,” he said honestly. “I missed you too.”
He rocked her back and forth, doing nothing more than letting her cry. Clearly, she’d needed to cry for a while. Her sobs were so ragged that his throat ached in sympathy.
As he held her, he noticed how thin she’d become. He could feel the bones of her spine and ribs through the thin sweater. She was shaking, too, but he didn’t know if that was cold or emotion.
“How long have you been here?” he asked when her sobs had turned into quick inhalations and she was clearly striving for calm.
Anna pulled back from him and pulled her sweater sleeves down over her hands, wiping her face with quick, nervous movements. He noticed that she was shaking even more violently now.
“I’m not sure,” she said, her voice coming in fits and starts as she hiccuped a few last sobs. She kept glancing toward the stairs as if she feared a Family member coming back. “It’s been a while. A few weeks, I think. Maybe. It’s hard to tell.”
Brad bit his tongue before he could ask about the kids. Even though he was desperate to know, he needed other answers first. And if the worst had happened, he wanted to give Anna some time to figure out how to tell him.
“Are you going to be on trial sometime soon too?” he asked gently.
“Yeah. They said I would be trialled at dawn tomorrow,” she said, shifting her weight—what there was of it—from foot to foot.
“I guess they’ve got a full docket for tomorrow,” Brad said.
Anna gave a quick, surprised laugh. “I guess they do,” she agreed.
Brad reached out to brush her hair off of her face. He wanted to touch her. It wasn’t a sexual thing. He simply needed proof that she was really there. If he woke up to find that she had been a dream, it really might be the last straw.
She flinched back initially, but then leaned into his touch. Maybe she needed the same thing. Several strands of her hair had stuck to her cheek from her tears. He moved them carefully.
“Do you know why they would be doing all of the trials on the same day?” he asked.
Anna gave a helpless looking shrug. “Not exactly. One of the men who brings my food said something about the stars aligning. I asked what stars he was talking about but they wouldn’t…they don’t answer my questions.”
“The bright and morning star,” Lee said. “You didn’t remember your astronomy, Bradley.”
Anna glanced from Brad to his father uncertainty. Brad thought for a long moment, but for the life of him couldn’t remember what particular celestial event his father was referring to.
“Tonight has been marked on my calendar for years,” Lee began. “Mercury will appear more brightly than it has in decades, occurring in tandem with a meteor shower that will peak just before dawn.”
Brad nodded slowly. It was beginning to come back to him.
“But what…what does that have to do with the morning star?” Anna asked in confusion.
“Some people used to call Mercury the morning star,” Brad explained, at last recalling one of the lessons Lee imparted years before. “It’s more commonly Venus, but I’m not surprised that these people are going in another direction. And morning star is—”
“Another name for Satan,” Lee finished.
Anna caught her breath. Lee only went back to checking the walls, trying to find a way out. Anna glanced up at Brad and he saw tears spilling down her cheeks.
“They won’t talk to me about Sammy and Martha,” she said, anticipating his next question. “They won’t answer anything that I ask.”
“Anna, did they—”
“They took them both,” she sobbed out, her voice hitching once again. “Before they got them away from me, I told them to pretend that they believe.”
“I think that would be
a good idea,” Brad started to say, hoping to calm her down, but she continued speaking, her voice growing more frantic.
“I tried to pretend, too,” she gasped out, wiping the tears off of her cheeks even as they continued to pour from her eyes. “I thought it was working! I thought that I had them fooled; they said that I was useful.”
“Useful?” Brad repeated. “What were they asking you to do?”
“I was helping make the meals and they let me—” Her breath hitched as she tried to gather herself to answer him fully. “They let me watch the kids when I wasn’t busy.”
“How many kids are there here?”
Anna shook her head. “I was never sure. They make us work in shifts. There were four on mine counting Sammy and Martha.”
Brad rubbed his chin, wondering if that was everyone. “Are their parents alive?”
Anna nodded. “Yes, they’re here. They’re part of the Family. I think that they put Sammy and Martha in their group because they’re so fully indoctrinated. They recite the Scriptures while they work.”
Brad only barely repressed a shiver of disgust at the idea. Something about the idea of the children reciting an amalgamation of Satan worship and Christian theology while they played was incredibly disturbing—probably because it seemed like it would be damn effective.
“It was awful to hear,” Anna said, her voice dropping lower. “I was never much into the Bible, but I know how some of the verses are supposed to go. Everything is…it’s just twisted now.”
“What happened next?” Brad asked. “How did you end up down here, Anna?”
She sighed heavily and linked her trembling fingers together. “After I’d been there for a while I thought that I had figured out the routine. I knew where everyone was and what they were doing. I’d found gaps in the surveillance. Or at least, I thought that I had.”
“Did you try to get away?” he asked, already knowing that it was true. Anna wasn’t the type of woman who could sit around for long. Not in a pressure-cooker situation. He’d seen that firsthand.
“I thought that I could get away, I really did,” she said miserably. “So I was trying to get to the tent that the kids were in, but they caught me. They said that they’d been watching me and that I had proven that I wasn’t speaking the truth.” She shivered and wrapped her arms around her own waist. “They said that I was corrupting the kids and then they threw me down here.”
“And they haven’t let you see Sammy or Martha since then?” he asked gently.
She shook her head. “No. I think they’re still pretending. I hope they are.”
“This is all my fault,” Brad said, shaking his head miserably. “You shouldn’t have tried to come back for me, Anna.”
“I…I didn’t,” Anna said, her own face mirroring his misery and a little bit of guilt.
He stared at her. “What? Yes you did. I found your note in the house in Island Falls. The one underneath the carving that Sammy put into the floorboards. You said that you were heading back to the cabin to find me.”
“No, Brad. I didn’t,” Anna repeated, looking even more upset. “The Family caught us the pretty much the minute we got to Island Falls; I think they’d been following us for a while.” She pushed her hair back again and sighed. “It was easy to trap us once we were in the house. And I think that they wanted us to have the hope. They like to take it away.”
Brad’s stomach clenched at seeing the sadness in her eyes. His father had finally paused in his frantic search for a way out. He was standing by the stairs, listening to her speak. His expression was unreadable because of the shadow that he stood in, but Brad doubted that it was very sympathetic.
“We’d been planning to stay there,” Anna continued. “I just wanted to go home.”
“So you really weren’t looking for me?” On a rational level Brad understood that it was the smarter decision but it left him feeling a little hollow all the same. He’d looked for her for so long. Had she really just walked out without looking back?
“I…I hoped that you’d come find us,” she said, meeting his eyes so that he couldn’t question her honesty. “I knew that you knew where the house was. I hoped you’d come and find us there. I was…I was counting on it.” She shook her head. “But they found us instead. They made me write that note and they made Sammy do that carving.”
Anna reached out and put her hands on Brad’s arms. “After that, I hoped that you wouldn’t come to Island Falls. And if you did, I had to hope that you wouldn’t find the note. I knew that it would bring you back here because you’ve always been so good to me. To all of us.” Tears shone in her bright green eyes as she said, “I’m so sorry, Brad. I’m sorry for everything that’s happened since you met me.”
Chapter 12
The night passed slowly, minute by minute dragging by. After examining the wound in Brad’s side and patching it up as best they could with the minimal supplies they still had, Brad and Anna sat down on the small cot she’d been given. Lee, meanwhile, continued to pace and mutter to himself. He reminded Brad of a wild animal who’d been caged for the first time.
Anna inched closer to Brad as she watched Lee pace. Brad put his arm around her shoulders and drew her against his side. She was still trembling, but she wasn’t shaking anymore. He was glad that she was managing to calm down. He still didn’t relish the idea of the trial at dawn, but he was glad that they were going to face it together, whatever it brought.
“Who is he, anyway?” she asked in an undertone as she tilted her head at Lee was currently on the top step of the entrance to the cellar.
Brad realized with a jolt that Anna wouldn’t have known. She’d seen picture of Lee in the cabin, but those wouldn’t look anything like the man who was prowling the cellar near them now. He was decades older and much more gaunt. And he’d been smiling in the pictures. Brad idly wondered when his father had last smiled. Certainly not on this journey with him. For someone who’d gotten exactly what he wanted, he clearly wasn’t enjoying being proven right.
“That’s my father,” Brad said quietly.
“What?” Anna yelped.
Lee looked over at them but Brad remained still and quiet and eventually his father turned away again.
“What?” Anna repeated in a whisper. “Are you serious?”
Brad nodded. “Yeah, I am. I met him on the road back to the cabin. He was staying with a woman named Vanessa. She’s nice even if she did drug my wine. I left my dog with her.”
Anna blinked and rubbed her fingers across her forehead. “What?” she repeated in complete confusion.
Brad gave a soft laugh. “Yeah, I guess I need to back up just a little bit, don’t I?”
“If you don’t mind,” she said with a grin. “It’s been a little too stressful around here for me to be able to untangle all of this stuff on the fly.”
He leaned back against the cold dirt wall and told Anna that he’d left Island Falls in a truck, but that he hadn’t been able to continue in it for long.
“Too bad,” she said when he told her where he’d had to leave it. “That bed would have been fantastic. I don’t think I’ve gotten a good night’s sleep since…well…”
“Since the day a crazy religious death cult started stalking us?” Brad asked.
She grinned up at him. “Yeah, since around then.”
Maybe it was strange, or at least a little abnormal that the two of them were joking and laughing while they waited for a trial that neither of them had any hope of being found innocent in. Or maybe it was just what it meant to be human. These were the moments that Brad had clung to sanity for. It was why he was sitting with someone that he loved. It was also why Lee was sitting alone at the top of the stairs.
Brad decided not to tell Anna about his troubles in the retirement community or about the fact that Bangor, Maine had fallen to complete anarchy. What was the point? There was nothing she could do about either of those things. Why should he stain what was more than likely his last day alive wit
h memories of the things he’d seen and done up until this point?
“So if you left Island Falls that long ago,” Anna said, counting days. “How did it take you this long to get here? Did the Family do something else to you?”
Brad shook his head. “No, we went to Ashland first. Lee had a friend there who made weaponry.”
Anna bit her lower lip, noticing the past tense that Brad had spoken in. “I’m guessing that he wasn’t there?” she asked.
Brad sighed. “No. It looked like someone had…well the living room was turned upside down and there was blood in a few places. So it didn’t look great—”
“You’re not pretending anymore, then?” Lee asked, his voice cutting into the chilled air between the steps and the cot.
“Pretending what?” Brad asked in confusion as Anna’s whole body went tense against his side.
“That something didn’t happen to my friend.”
“I never said that I thought that nothing happened to Garcia,” Brad protested. “I just said—”
“You just said that you were too squeamish for me to take the revenge that he deserved,” Lee replied with a sneer.
“What kind of revenge?” Anna asked, her face going pale.
“I could have taken out at least half of the men occupying that town,” Lee said. “But Bradley here wouldn’t let me.”
Brad could see how closely Lee was watching Anna’s face as he spoke. He knew suddenly that Lee was going to gauge her by the answer that she gave his implied question. It hung in the air like fog.
“Would you have let me kill those men or are you just as useless as my son?”
Anna’s hand groped for Brad’s and he twined his fingers with hers. “How did you know that they were the ones who killed your friend?” she asked. “How do you even know that your friend is really dead? He might have just been hurt, especially if he’s a survivalist like you. Those men might even have been keeping him safe and helping him—”
Lee gave a scoffing noise and Anna stopped speaking. “You’re willing to twist things a lot to protect someone you don’t even know,” he said. “We both know good and well that the simplest explanation is usually the right one. They saw what Garcia had. They wanted it. They either killed him in his own damn house or they knocked him out and took him prisoner. Why shouldn’t I have done something about that?”