by Mark Alpert
Marlowe shouted, “Sully!” and dropped his stick, but as he rushed toward Sullivan a gunshot broke the hush of the pine forest. Marlowe shrieked and spun around, clutching his shoulder. At first John assumed that Ariel had grabbed a gun and started shooting, but she was busy raking Sullivan’s face with her fingernails. Then there was a second gunshot. The bullet smashed into the skull of the Rifleman who’d pinned John to the ground. The man’s head jerked to the side and spouted blood as he crumpled.
Then the woods exploded with gunfire. The barrage came from deeper within the forest, behind the pine trees to John’s right, and it struck down three more Riflemen, killing them where they stood. The rest of Sullivan’s men scrambled for cover, diving behind tree trunks and rock piles and thickets. Within seconds they pulled out their carbines and returned fire, but their shots were wild and random because they couldn’t see their attackers. Meanwhile, Sullivan flung Ariel off his back and retreated with his men, hurtling over a fallen trunk and disappearing in the undergrowth. Marlowe followed him, staggering.
While the bullets whizzed overhead, Ariel crawled over to John, dragging her useless legs behind her. “Don’t get up,” she warned. “Stay low and follow me.”
Although John was bewildered, he didn’t ask any questions. His gratitude and relief were so strong he would’ve followed her anywhere. His broken ribs flared in agony as he rolled over onto his stomach, but he didn’t make a sound. Then he and Ariel scuttled on their elbows through the dirt, heading for the trees that the unseen attackers hid behind.
Soon the gunfire ebbed. Sullivan and his men were running through the woods, heading back to the highway by the lakeshore. After a few more seconds John heard the distant roar of half a dozen motorcycle engines. The roar grew louder as the diminished band of Riflemen revved their bikes and raced off. Then the noise gradually faded, and the forest fell silent again.
When John looked up he saw an Amish man step out from behind one of the pine trees. He wore a broad-brimmed straw hat and a long-sleeved white shirt without any buttons. A pair of suspenders held up his pants. He was tall and powerfully built and had a thick reddish beard, but no mustache. John recalled what Ariel had said about the residents of Haven, how they disguised themselves as Amish to avoid scrutiny from the local authorities. But this particular man’s disguise was marred by the fact that he carried an M4 carbine. He approached them cautiously, holding his gun at the ready. “Lily?” he called. “Are you injured, milady?”
Ariel nodded. “I can’t walk but I’m in no immediate danger. I’m very glad to see you, Conroy.”
The man pointed his rifle at John. “Who is this outsider? Did Sullivan bring him here?”
“Nay, I did. He’s a friend. How many guardsmen are with you?”
He whistled. Four more men in Amish garb emerged from hiding, each carrying either an assault rifle or a pistol. “We were on patrol near Flower Creek, two miles to the north,” Conroy said. “We spied the flare, so we hastened here to investigate.”
Ariel turned to John and smiled. “I owe you an apology. Bringing the flare gun was a good idea.” She sat upright, resting her back against a nearby pine.
John was surprised to see the small, leather-bound notebook in her lap. He pointed at it. “You got it back?”
“I pulled it out of the pocket of his jacket while I was scratching the bastard’s face.” Her smile broadened. “Pretty clever, eh?”
“Lily!” Conroy stared at her, dumbfounded. “He knows about your Treasure?”
“I told you, cuz, he’s a friend. Over the past two days he’s saved my life many times.”
Conroy turned to John and looked at him carefully. “I’ve seen this outsider’s face before. In our files. Is this your paramour?”
Ariel stopped smiling. “Aye, he is. What of it?”
Conroy’s face reddened. “I need to speak with you privately, milady.”
Ariel took a deep breath. Then she nodded at Conroy, who approached the pine tree and crouched beside her. They spoke in whispers that became more urgent and agitated as the conversation went on. After a couple of minutes Ariel’s face had reddened just as much as Conroy’s. They exchanged a few more heated whispers, and then Conroy stood up and went to talk with the other guards. At the same time, Ariel looked at John. Her eyes were glassy.
“My cousins are going to take us to Haven.” She spoke haltingly now, her voice tense. “But they have to bind your hands.”
“You mean, tie me up?”
She nodded. “I had to tell him what you know. About Haven. And our family. I had no choice.”
John’s throat tightened. “Wait a second. What’s going to happen when we get to Haven?”
“You must appear before the Council of Elders. Your fate is in their hands now.” Her voice cracked. “I’m sorry, John. I’m so, so sorry.”
Conroy returned with two of his men. One of them pointed a pistol at John’s head. The other held a length of rope.
PART II
HAVEN
ELEVEN
John marched through the woods with his hands tied behind his back. The guardsmen from Haven made no allowances for his broken nose and ribs. They trained their pistols at his head and kept him moving.
The trail twisted through the forest, climbing over knolls and descending into ravines. It would’ve been a grueling hike even if he wasn’t injured. John panted from the effort, his chest aching with every breath, but he didn’t complain. Keeping his face rigid, he stared at the back of Ariel’s head, which bobbed behind Conroy’s. The guard carried her piggyback, cradling her broken legs against his hips while she gripped his muscular shoulders. John focused on her long, swaying red hair and felt a surge of anger. She’d handed him over, turned him in. Once they reached Haven, the Elders would kill him. He was guilty of the crime of knowing too much.
The sheer ingratitude of it, that’s what he couldn’t get over. He’d saved Ariel’s life, and this was how she repaid him! She said she’d had no choice, but John didn’t believe it. Did she really have to reveal that he knew her family’s secret? Couldn’t she have left out that detail when she explained the situation to Conroy? But no, she had to tell him everything. She had to follow her damn oath to the letter.
After a while he shifted his gaze from Ariel to her cousins. The two guardsmen behind him, the ones who carried the pistols, were young men with bright red hair and sparse beards. Conroy and the two other guards were older, their long beards flecked with gray. Except for their Amish clothing and facial hair, they looked a lot like Sullivan’s men. Clearly, there’d been a split among the men in Ariel’s family, with some leaving Haven to follow Sullivan and the rest remaining loyal to the Elders. John still didn’t know what had caused the split, but he could see its effects in the way the men treated Ariel. Whereas the Riflemen had looked at her with undisguised hatred, the guards from Haven treated her with respect. Although Conroy had scolded her earlier, now he showed great deference, constantly checking to see if she was comfortable as he carried her through the forest. Meanwhile, the other guards sneaked glances at her as if she were a celebrity. No, more than a celebrity—there was genuine awe in their faces, and some fear as well. They looked at her as if she were a goddess, a temperamental deity who’d hurl a lightning bolt at them if the mood struck her.
John frowned. Ariel wasn’t a goddess. But maybe she wasn’t human, either. Three hundred and seventy-three years. Could anyone stay human after living for so long? Maybe that was why she’d handed him over to Conroy. John was less than a tenth of her age. Even if she cared for him, it didn’t matter. When balanced against her eternal family, how could his fate be important?
After a solid hour of walking, Conroy called for a ten-minute break. They stopped at a small clearing, a rough circle of weeds and mud surrounded by the pines. Conroy crouched by one of the trees and Ariel slid off his back. She looked over her shoulder and stared at John for a moment, her face pale and unreadable. Then Conroy ordered the two youn
ger guards to escort John to the other side of the clearing, as far as possible from Ariel.
Grabbing him by the elbows, the guards found a relatively dry patch of ground and lowered him to a sitting position. The movement jarred his broken ribs, and he let out a gasp. The guard on his left, who had a sharp chin and wire-rim glasses, looked at him gravely. “Are you in pain?”
John shook his head. “Nah, I’m feeling great. Never better.”
The guard pulled an army-surplus canteen from his backpack and unscrewed the cap. “Tilt your head back. You need to drink.”
John wanted to refuse as a matter of principle, but he was too thirsty. He tilted his head back and opened his mouth, letting the guard pour the water onto his tongue. It tasted horrible, like moldy bread. John spat it out. “What the hell? You trying to poison me?”
“Nay, it’s medicine,” said the guard on his right. This one had thick reddish eyebrows. “To ease the pain in your chest and the swelling in your nose.”
John eyed both of them warily. He remembered the herbal potion Ariel had made and how quickly it had healed her bullet wounds. But he was suspicious. “What’s the point of giving me medicine if you’re just gonna kill me once we get to Haven?”
The guards exchanged glances, and then the sharp-chinned one spoke. “We aren’t brutes, sir. We take no pleasure in watching you suffer.”
“Well, that’s good to know.” John grimaced, feeling another stab of pain in his rib cage. “All right, I’ll drink it. Might as well be comfortable in my last hours.”
He opened his mouth again and forced himself to swallow the potion. When he was finished, the guard capped the canteen. “Now rest and conserve your strength, paramour. We still have miles to walk.”
The guards holstered their pistols but kept watching him carefully. Up close, they looked even younger, in their late teens or early twenties. John decided to start a conversation with the boys. They might tell him something useful. “By the way, you don’t have to call me paramour. My name is John Rogers. I’d shake your hands, but mine are tied up at the moment.”
It was a bad joke, and neither of the guards smiled. But the sharp-chinned one tipped his straw hat. “Gower Fury is my name.” He pointed at the other guard. “And this fellow is Archibald.”
Gower? Archibald? Although the men of Haven weren’t eternally youthful like the women, their names and speech patterns seemed to come from a different century. “Excuse me if this sounds rude,” John said, “but you guys have a very old-fashioned way of talking.”
Gower shrugged. “This is the way we speak in Haven. We learned our grammar from our mothers and grandmothers, who spoke this way in England before they came to America. Only the Rangers speak as you do, and only when they’re undertaking their assignments.”
“Rangers?”
“They’re the ones who are allowed to venture outside Haven to perform the tasks assigned by the Council of Elders. Very few of us are granted this privilege. You must undergo years of training as a guardsman before the council will let you become a Ranger.” Gower pointed at himself, smiling proudly. “I’m in training now.”
John thought of Hal and Richard, the men who’d accompanied Ariel in New York. He wondered if anyone at Haven knew they were dead. “So the Rangers go with the women when they’re meeting their paramours?”
Gower nodded. “That’s one of the assignments, but there are many others. The Rangers gather information about the state of the world. They also participate in our scientific investigations and oversee our financial interests.”
“Financial interests?”
“Aye, our family has made many discreet investments in the outside world. The Rangers operate the holding companies, which buy and sell—”
“Hold, Gower.” The guard named Archibald, the one with the thick eyebrows, rested his hand on the other’s shoulder. “You say too much.”
The look on his face was so serious, John had to laugh. “You’re kidding, right? Once we get to Haven, I’m dead. Who am I gonna tell your secrets to?”
Archibald shook his head. “Our task is to guard you, not talk to you.”
“Just tell me one thing, okay? What’s Ariel’s task? What does she do for Haven?”
The guardsmen exchanged glances again. Then Gower stared at Ariel, who was drinking from a canteen on the other side of the clearing. “She’s a Ranger, our very best. The Elders have sent her on many important assignments, starting more than three hundred years ago.” He gazed at her for a few more seconds, then blushed as he turned back to John. “I’m jealous of you, sir. Although your current situation is unfortunate, at least you had the chance to be her paramour. It must’ve been a great gift.”
The kid was smitten with her, no doubt about it. John wondered how many other men at Haven felt this way about Ariel. For all he knew, she might even have a husband there. “What does she do at Haven when she’s not on assignment?”
“Oh, many things. But her greatest passion is for science. She oversees the experiments in our botanical and genetic laboratories. She’s accumulated so much knowledge over the years that her contributions are indispensable.”
“And, uh, is she married? You do have marriages at Haven, right?”
Archibald laughed, slapping his hand against his thigh. “Look at him! Gower, I believe this man loves her almost as much as you do!”
Gower glared at him, and so did John. Archibald was a real jerk. “Stop being an asshole,” John warned. “I just asked a question.”
The asshole sneered. “And it’s not our place to answer it. You should pose your question to milady. Assuming, that is, you get a final opportunity to talk with her.”
That put an end to the conversation. John stared at the ground for several minutes, refusing to look at either Ariel or the guards. Then Conroy said it was time to start moving again, and they resumed their march through the forest.
The next few miles on the trail were just as rugged as the ones before, but John found the going a little easier now. His chest didn’t hurt as much, and his nose had stopped throbbing. The herbal potion was working as advertised.
He was still anxious, though. He kept thinking of the Council of Elders and the fate that awaited him. He needed to distract himself, to change the subject of his thoughts. If he was going to die a few hours from now, he wanted to think of only comforting things. So as he marched through the woods he focused on the only truly happy time in his life, the years when he worked with Father Murphy. He pictured the old priest striding down the forest trail, dressed in his usual outfit—jeans, flannel shirt, construction boots. The guy never wore his clerical collar. He said it made him look like a clown.
It was easy to imagine Father Murphy striding beside him, because that’s how they’d spent most of their working hours, walking together down the streets of Kensington. Every evening they’d visit the busiest street corners and try to persuade the younger kids to go home to their mothers. Talking to the older boys—the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds—was usually a waste of time because they’d already committed themselves to the drug business, but the younger ones still had a chance of getting out. Sometimes John would simply grab the boys and drag them to the youth center at St. Anne’s Church. Because he’d worked the corners himself he knew how to argue with the kids. Father Murphy let him do most of the talking, and John got better and better at the job as time went on.
When he wasn’t working for the Anti-Gang Project, he took classes at the community college, trying to make up for all the years he’d pissed away. That was where he met Carol, a pretty, studious accounting major from South Philly. She was suspicious of him at first—she could tell he was from the streets. But he invited her to a church supper at St. Anne’s, and all her suspicions vanished once she saw him with Father Murphy and the kids. A few weeks later she left her parents’ house and moved into John’s apartment on Somerset Street. She got pregnant soon afterward, and John was ecstatic. Just before she started to show, they got marri
ed at St. Anne’s, with Father Murphy performing the honors. Ivy was born six months later.
The next five years passed quickly. John saved some money, got his bachelor’s degree in social work, and changed hundreds of diapers. Carol stayed home with the baby, but after a while she grew restless. She wanted to move to a better neighborhood before Ivy started kindergarten. John, though, hated the idea of leaving Kensington. The Anti-Gang Project had become a crusade for him, an all-consuming struggle. Salazar, John’s old rival in the Disciples, had taken over all the drug crews in the area, and his boys harassed John whenever they could. The animosity between the two men was growing, and John felt that moving out of the neighborhood would be like backing down from the fight. His attitude made Carol furious; she said he cared more about a bunch of gangbangers than his own daughter. Even Father Murphy worried that John was becoming obsessed. “You’re doing a lot of good, son,” he used to say. “And the Lord will surely reward you for your good deeds in heaven. But I have to warn you: In this world, no good deed goes unpunished.”
At the time, John thought this was one of the old priest’s jokes. But it was true. The good get punished. The innocent get punished.
After the shooting Carol couldn’t forgive him. As soon as Ivy’s funeral was over, she moved out of their apartment and returned to South Philly. Meanwhile, John bought a gun on the street, an old SIG Sauer semiautomatic. He’d been fast asleep when the bastards had fired at the windows of his apartment, so he couldn’t identify Ivy’s murderers, couldn’t testify against them in court. But he knew who did it. He knew exactly who they were. He went looking for Salazar and his boys, searching every corner in the neighborhood, ready to send them to hell.
He never got his revenge, though. Justice was done, but he didn’t get any satisfaction from it. In the end, John was left with almost nothing. Just a child-size bed and an old wooden bureau, full of tiny pink clothes.