by Urban Waite
Lonny raised his hands then turned and looked toward Will and to the father. A small half smile began to spread across his face. Will didn’t even see what happened next, it seemed that fast. The boy was on the ground with blood streaming from his nostrils, Lonny standing over him, one of his boots already across the wrist that held the knife.
The father turned but Will was close and he broadsided the man and sent him to the ground. Will took the rifle from his shoulder and held it on the man just as he tried to get back to his feet. The sound of Will moving the bolt forward froze the man in place.
The boy tried to bring his other hand across and take the knife but Lonny bent and punched him hard in the ribs then reached and twisted the knife away. He stood and tossed the knife and backed away a little as the boy wheezed and tried to gather his breath.
“Stop,” Will said, watching all of this, watching Lonny where he stood and watching the boy. “He was only trying to protect what’s his.”
“What’s his?” Lonny asked, his voice elevated in a tone of disbelief. “What’s his?” He took a step away from the boy then he turned and pivoted and brought his boot up fast and kicked the boy so hard he left the ground. The boy was wheezing and rolling on the ground, trying to get his hands and knees beneath him.
“Stop it,” Will said again. He could see the same wild smile come across Lonny’s face.
Lonny kicked the boy twice in the side as the boy tried to get to his feet and he was rolling now away from Lonny and Lonny was going after him, kicking him time after time. Huffing with the effort. “When are they going to learn? When are they all going to fucking learn their lesson?” he was saying. “What’s theirs is mine. They think they know better than me or John. They think they can just close their eyes and look away.” He kicked the boy again. He bent and grabbed the boy at his shirt collar and brought him up and he started punching him now, raising the boy toward him with one hand on his collar and punching him with the other.
Will was on Lonny almost as soon as he’d made up his mind he had to stop it. He dragged Lonny backwards, the rifle underneath Lonny’s chin and Will backing, one hand on the stock and the other on the barrel, choking Lonny and dragging him from the campground. “You were going to kill him,” Will said. “Calm down. Calm the fuck down.”
The father had risen and he had bent over his son and Will could see the son’s slow movements and see that he had been beaten badly but that he was still alive and still conscious. Will dragged Lonny farther and he could feel Lonny start to slacken. He eased the rifle off his throat and asked him if he would calm the fuck down.
When Will let him go, Lonny stood there rubbing at his throat. He looked toward the camp where the father still knelt, trying to help his son. “There’s no one here,” Lonny said.
“That doesn’t mean you can kill them.”
“You saw how they reacted when I talked about the church.”
“I saw how they reacted when you threatened to steal from them. You need to calm down, Lonny. You need to think.”
He was still rubbing at his throat, and he looked to Will. “It’s time they knew. It’s time they all knew what is coming for them.”
“What’s that?” Will said.
“The end is coming and they can help us and be saved or they can go against us and burn with all the rest.”
Will watched Lonny. He didn’t know what to say. “You’re a fucking lunatic,” Will finally got out.
“No,” Lonny said. “I’m a survivor. And all of us are riding in the ark and some of us just don’t know it yet.”
Will looked to Lonny and then he looked to where the father knelt trying to comfort his son. When Will approached, the father turned and held an upraised palm toward Will and said, “Ella fue a la iglesia. Allá.” He moved his hand, pointing past Will to the ridge above.
Will turned and looked. He thought about saying something more, but there was nothing more to say that would make it any better. Something was going on here that he did not understand and he looked to Lonny and then looked up at the ridge.
* * *
THE HAWK PASSED AGAIN, THE SHADOW NOW SHOWING IN THE grass as the bird turned, rising on the thermals. Mary May was halfway across the broad field that ran the bottom of the valley and she turned now to look upward on the sky, trying to see where the hawk had gone.
Though she had known in some way that what she was attempting was beyond any real sense or hope, she had gone ahead anyway. Now she was walking in the direction the boy had shown her, working over and over in her mind the question he had asked.
“Your brother is all you have?”
Drew was three years younger than her and he had been the last, along with the rest of his class, to graduate from the high school before they shut it down. There was a time afterwards where she had just worked. She had worked the bar and she had done her thing as she had always done and she had not thought about him but to share a meal from time to time, or see him in passing at their parents’ place. She had kept her head down and she had saved and tried to help her parents with the bar.
When he came in and told her that he had joined the army and would soon be leaving, she had not known what to say. She realized for a long time, ever since they had been kids together, she had never talked to him, she had never truly thought to ask him anything of any real depth.
She walked on. She thought about what the herder boy had asked her next. She thought about what he’d said to her, he had wondered what she would do when she found him. He had wondered what would happen if she found her brother to be someone other than who she thought he was.
“I hope you mean the same to him as he means to you,” the boy had said. He had turned the horse around right there and with a little nod to her he was gone down the ridge the way he’d come.
* * *
WILL CAME UP THE RIDGE WITH LONNY FOLLOWING. THEY USED the switchback path that showed the horse tracks in the dirt. But that was mostly covered with sedge and the droppings of many sheep.
When Will looked back down the sheep were still there in the field but he could see nothing of the camp that was beneath the trees. He had said little to Lonny since they’d left, but he could hear Lonny grumbling over it from time to time and complaining that they should have at least taken the horse if they meant to catch up to Mary May.
“Is that how it is?” Will asked. “Us versus them?”
“That’s how it’s always been,” Lonny said.
“When they came to me and offered me a place with them I was grateful for it. They did not force my hand.”
“Simpler times,” Lonny said. “The time is coming when it won’t be that simple anymore and the more we have among us—the more we have that are willing to hear The Father’s words—the better all of us will be.”
“You act like the end of the world will come tomorrow.”
“It might not come tomorrow, or the next day, but that doesn’t mean it is not coming. People like you and me will survive.”
“What kind of people are we?” Will asked.
“We’re people who do what they need to do.”
“Not if it means pushing other people under,” Will said.
“You and me,” Lonny said. “We see the world in different ways, but we are no different.”
“We all have our purpose,” Will said, playing off what Lonny had told him at the empty Kershaw farm.
“That’s right,” Lonny said. “That’s what John says all the time. We all have our purpose. We all must do our duty for the church.”
They came to the top of the ridge and Will could see it was much like the other they had moved over earlier that morning. One side a gradual slope, while the other, the side that they now came to, fell away almost as if it had been scooped from the rock by the hand of some celestial being. Steep and perilous and littered below with rock and talus that had fallen from the very spot they now were standing.
Will stopped and looked down at the valley below. He waite
d for Lonny to take the last few steps and then when the man came up and stood beside him, Will took the rifle from his shoulder, flipped the lens cover up on the scope, and put the lens to his eye. There was a wide valley below with a broad field of sedge and Junegrass and he ran his vision upon it. When he brought his eye away he almost could not believe that he had found Mary May.
She was walking down the middle of the field and he could see that she would be into the far wood in the next quarter mile. He placed the scope to his eye again and marked her. When he brought the scope away again, he looked down into the field. She was a tiny thing there in the depths and he knew that with the naked eye he would have missed her.
Without taking his eyes away, he handed the rifle over to Lonny. “Take a look,” Will said. He was watching the tiny figure out there below them. A hawk was circling high above and it was a speck itself, riding on the thermals. “You see the hawk out there? Put the scope on it and then run the lens down all the way to the meadow.”
He watched Lonny now. He watched Lonny find the hawk and then he watched Lonny move the scope down and find Mary May.
“John will be very happy,” Lonny said. He brought his eye away from the scope and looked to Will and in that same moment a rifle fired that was not the one Lonny held in his two hands.
Will turned and moved toward the sound. It was down in the mountain field out of which they had just climbed. The rifle fired again and he heard the echo of the shot and the reverberation as the sound spread from one side of the valley to the other. Then Will started to hear more shots, automatic gunfire, and the big booming of a shotgun.
At first he had thought maybe the herder and his son had followed them. Or had taken up some position to better take revenge. But now as Will peered back over a loose conglomeration of rocks on the sheep and the meadow below, he could see the herder had started shooting at five men now moving up across the meadow—moving exactly toward where Will and Lonny now had come.
Out front and leading the men, amid the surging sheep that swirled and stampeded in a sort of whirling sweep of white, was John Seed. He held in front of him a large metal antenna shaped almost like a wire grid. Will knew it immediately and he knew that John was not hunting wolves, but that he was hunting them and hunting Mary May and Will should have known it from the start.
The herder fired again and John’s men ducked and then rose, shooting over the backs of the sheep as they came up through the field. Will watched one man, holding an AK-47, strafe the campsite, the bullets raking across the dirt.
Several more single rifle shots were fired from the sheep camp but Will could not see the herders. They were somewhere beneath the trees and they were firing on the men as they moved in among the sheep. A moment later he heard the clop of the hooves and he saw the two herders doubled on the horse, riding fast along the bottom of the meadow and away. Several of John’s men were shooting at them, taking shots as they rose and fired again over the backs of sheep.
Will might not have heard the click of his rifle had they kept on shooting. But as close to him, and as familiar to him as it was, he turned almost in the same instant Lonny pushed the safety forward on the rifle. Lonny’s eye was to the scope and the barrel faced down toward the valley in which Mary May was walking, and Lonny did not need to push the .308 cartridge forward with the bolt, because Will now realized with horror that he had already done it for him.
* * *
MARY MAY WAS THREE QUARTERS OF THE WAY ACROSS THE meadow when she heard the thunder. She stopped and looked toward the sky. Blue as a robin’s egg. She turned and looked toward the ridge she had descended from and she took a few steps back the way she’d come.
She heard the pulse of thunder again, but she knew it was not thunder. The booming sound was diffuse and more of a rumble, just as distant thunder might sometimes be. But around it, and at the edge of this new sound, was the snap of gunfire that she knew well enough and that she had heard all through her life out here in the country.
She was looking up toward the ridge and she was wondering whether whatever had happened could be helped and she moved now, walking with purpose back the way she’d come. Soon she was running and she had taken out the .38. She held it tight in her hand to make sure she would not lose it. She came nearly halfway across the field when the firing stopped and there was a strange moment when the world returned to normal. Just a breeze working across the meadow, and the sun above, and the far branches of trees wavering a little in the wind.
The rifle shot that passed her was no more than a foot from her, traveling in the air then thudding into the ground another ten feet on. She felt the air move, she turned and saw where the dust had bloomed up from off the ground and then as she stood there, beginning to realize what was happening, she heard the distant shot of the rifle sound from right there atop the ridge.
* * *
WILL MADE IT TO LONNY JUST AS HE PULLED THE TRIGGER. WILL bowled him over and sent him to his back. The rifle came loose from his hands and Will watched it skitter atop rock for a moment then fall over the edge of the ridge and disappear.
Lonny came up off the ground with his hands out on either side of him like a wrestler taking up his stance.
“You were going to shoot her,” Will said. They stood no more than five feet apart and Will watched Lonny circle downslope, his hands still out, his eyes never leaving Will.
“Better to do it here than to do it somewhere else. Better if it seems like she went into the woods and never came back out.”
“Christ, Lonny. We were told to find her. We were told to find her and help her out.”
Lonny struck out fast with a single fist and Will only had time to fall away and catch himself with one hand. He scrambled back to his feet, feeling too old and too slow to be any match for the quickness Lonny brought with each movement. Lonny was smiling at him and he whipped out a fist again that brushed past Will’s right cheek. Both still wore their packs and it made their movements awkward and a little counterweighted as Will circled the edge of the ridge then came down, trying to stay just out of Lonny’s reach.
“Pretty limber for an old guy,” Lonny said. He came inside and popped one fist up hard, catching Will in the ribs. “But still an old guy.” Will bent double, dry heaving. Lonny brought the opposite fist down hard against his cheekbone.
Will fell facedown against the smooth windswept rock of the ridge. His face was on fire from where Lonny had knocked him and his belly muscles were cramping and pulling on each other like some tug of war within his stomach. He tried to roll but Lonny kicked him and Will—using the force of the kick to move downslope—fell off a ledge of rock and landed another four feet down.
He felt like someone had thrown dynamite at his feet and he had been launched upward only to land, barely whole, forty feet away. He wasn’t sure if anything was broken and pieces of him ached and hurt like they had not hurt for years, but he knew he needed to get up. He knew he needed to help himself, and he knew he needed to stop Lonny from whatever it was he was doing.
Will stood fast, just as Lonny came to the edge of the small ledge. He took one of Lonny’s feet and pulled back hard. Will heard bone hitting the rock as Lonny landed first on his backpack, then the residual force whipped his head down and his skull bounced then resettled against the top of the ledge. Now Will moved around, wheezing with one hand held atop his belly. He came around the ledge while Lonny was still gathering himself together, now turning on his side. There was blood in his hair and on the rock where his skull had hit.
Before Will could get to him Lonny had risen to one knee. He pushed himself fully upright and Will circled, looking for anything that he might use to defend himself with. Lonny brought his fists up again and came at him. There were loose rocks nearby that Will thought to reach for, but grabbing for them would put him again within Lonny’s reach.
Will backed as far as he could. He was moving toward the edge now and Lonny moved after him. Blood was wet against the side of Lonny’s
neck where it had fallen from his hairline. Will looked again behind him but he could see nothing to stop himself from going over. The rifle was down there somewhere. Ten feet? Fifty? A hundred feet below? He turned again, inches from the edge. He could see the rifle now. It had landed on a small outcropping, three feet down. Will began to move but in that instant, just as he decided this might be his only chance, Lonny swung, his right hand striking out as Will tried to duck and move for the rifle just below.
The fist would have struck him if he hadn’t decided just a half second before to go for the rifle. But as it happened, with Lonny already off balance, already woozy and bleeding from the back of his head, he went over. Will turned just as the fist passed by him, followed by Lonny’s twisting body, arm outstretched as his forward momentum carried him across the edge of the ridge and out into the broad space beyond.
Will saw him falling. It seemed like a minute before Lonny hit, but it must have been merely a second or two. The body landed in the loose rock and talus a hundred feet below then bounced awkwardly as it somersaulted and careened, legs and arms stretched outward down the slope, sliding to a stop amid the larger boulders toward the bottom of the cliff debris.
Will stood there staring down. One of Lonny’s arms lay behind him in strange backwards rapture, while his face looked upward and his head appeared like it had been popped and then stretched away from off his body. The skin of the neck the only thing to keep it now attached.
Will bent and lay against the edge of the ridge. He reached a hand for the rifle and came up holding it by the stock. Quickly he worked the bolt and checked the rifle over, moving it to one side then the other in a quick study of wood and metal. It seemed okay but there was a crack in the lens when he raised his eye to it and looked again down into the empty meadow he had seen Mary May passing across only minutes before.
* * *
AS HER LUNGS BEAT, PULLING AT THE AIR LIKE THE AIR ITSELF was not enough and the capillaries in her heart burst like distant stars, far away but looming ever closer—she ran. Flat out, full speed ahead, no looking back, no pause, no fucking way she was letting anyone catch her. In the checkered light of shadow and sun that came streaming down through the pines, the world bounced across her vision with the frenetic pull of some devil’s hacksaw, raking away at the earth from down below.