by Urban Waite
He came away from the window and without even pausing to speak to Drew, Will bent and lifted the man up and over his shoulder. Will guessed he weighed around a hundred and forty pounds and the weight of that first step nearly stopped Will in his tracks, but the next step felt a little better, and the step after was a little easier. He had carried full-grown bucks that weighed the same as Drew, but they had not been alive and they had not been fighting and Will now purposefully knocked Drew’s head twice against the jam of the back door as they both went through.
“Don’t fuck around,” Will said, keeping his voice low. “I told Mary May I was getting you out of here and I’m going to do it. But we’re going to get your sister first because you’re heavy as fuck and I could use a hand.”
He hadn’t gone more than fifty feet when he turned and looked out between the houses to the road. Holly was standing there and it was as if her feet had been nailed right there in place. Her mouth was open like she was about to scream and her eyes were on him where he stood, Drew up over his shoulder, the rifle over the other, the .38 down the front of Will’s pants, and the blood and bruises showing on his face and arms.
For a second he thought to tell her it wasn’t what it looked like. But he knew it was exactly what it looked like. And just as she was about to take a step toward him, or to run screaming up the road to the church or to the guards with their automatic rifles, Will turned and ran, still carrying Drew atop his shoulder.
* * *
MARY MAY WAS COMING BACK INTO HERSELF. SHE HAD BEEN washed far out to sea and her head swam, then dived, and for a very long time it was like she was not within herself at all but floating somewhere in the deep below.
Now she began to feel the pressure on her chest. She smelled the alcohol John had used to wash her. The sting, almost like an electric current vibrating across her breastplate. John took the needle back, and now he leaned and wiped a rag across her chest then stood looking down upon her.
He sat again on the stool. She blinked then blinked again and tried to wash the haze from the surface of her eyeballs but whatever it was it seemed not to wash at all and she saw him lean again and place the needle to her skin. When she looked down she could see the tattoo was halfway done, the black ink showing on her skin and the raised lettering swollen and red around the edges.
“I’m glad we have this time alone together,” John said. “I like to have time alone with all I mark.”
She watched him shift atop the stool then run the rag across her chest again. There was blood seen there amid the ink and her head swooned a moment then recovered.
He began to work again, and she felt him move the needle down then bring it up again as he formed the letter V.
“Sometimes Bliss works to hold you inside your head,” he said. “I’ve seen it do strange things to people. I’ve seen them hallucinate, and to disappear within the high. There is a common experience that they all tell me about afterwards, and that is of them looking up from down below. They are looking down a long path, or they are looking up as if from out of a well and if they can make it to the top they can make it back. But many have said to me they feared they might never make it.” He ran the needle down the V again then brought it back up again. “You will make it, Mary May. I can see that in you. I can see you will be fine. And once you realize your sin. Once you see how it has been brought forth onto your skin, you will understand it better and you will come and ask for it to be severed from the body.”
He bent and pressed the needle into her once again. He had started on the Y. The pain she felt was more acute and she looked around the room now and began to remember the reason she was even kneeling here. Her brother Drew had set this up. She thought of him now. She thought of Will. She wondered where they were. She wondered whether Will was coming for her.
There was pain now like she had not felt before. A dull, almost everlasting pain that seemed to hover across the top of her breast and to slip down and wrap itself around her bones. She turned and looked down on the needle, and she saw the word had taken shape. ENVY. Red and swollen was the word and her own blood rose red from among the black.
“Almost done,” John said. He moved back again and wiped the cloth across her chest. He leaned outward and whistled in self-congratulation at his work. She looked again. The letters were two inches high and they spanned the center of her upper chest.
He wiped her again. Then, after appraising her a moment, he bent and pushed the needle once more across the wording, tracing each letter as he went. Tears were forming in her eyes and now she began to think of her hands and of her feet and there was a desire in her to get away, far, far away from here. Will had told her not to trust John. He had told her she might need to run and to get away. But he had also said he would come for her and she looked now to the door behind which John had placed his stool. The door was open and though she wanted Will and her brother to appear there they did not. She was still watching the hallway beyond when she began to hear the siren. Now, pausing in his work, John’s head turned to better hear the siren, too. He stood and looked about, running his eyes out on the hallway and the place where the siren seemed to grow only louder.
He took a step out, and he was standing there in the hallway now. Mary May looked down at her chest. The letters were bleeding and as she tried to stand she faltered and had to reach a hand out and support herself with the stool. She remembered now about the knife tucked away beneath her calf and she bent and put a hand to the floor and, almost in disbelief, pulled up the knife and held it in her hand.
She could barely get her feet beneath her, but she knew she had to. She had to run. She had to find her brother and she knew now almost without a doubt that whatever Will had tried to do, escape or find her brother, he had failed at one or maybe even both. She put a hand out, tried for balance. John had disappeared, and she looked now to the open door. She tried to get one foot in front of the other, but both her feet seemed to be made of gelatin and her legs felt as wobbly as rubber bands.
It was as she tried to get her feet together that she kicked the vial of powder and saw it roll and then come to a stop at the edge of the room where the wall came down and met the floor. She stumbled toward it. Each movement pulling at her freshly tattooed skin. Her chest from her breasts to her neck felt like it was afire but she kept moving, keeping her eye ahead and on the little vial that now might offer her the only chance she had.
She came to the wall as if she had not expected to come to it so soon. She hit hard and slid, her one open hand bracing for the floor. In her other hand, she held the knife and now as she came to a rest, she moved her fingers outward and found the vial and brought it to her teeth. It was stoppered with a rubber cork and she bit at it then spit the cork away.
The siren was still blaring overhead, but she could hear between its howling roll that there were footsteps coming closer. She pushed herself up, and using the wall to steady herself she came to the door just as John returned.
“Where are you going?” he said. He was smiling, as if this were all some game she’d made for them, the siren blaring and the grin across his face.
The smile ended as soon as he saw the knife she was holding in her hand and, caught off guard, he took a step away. She jumped and landed on him, bringing him to the floor. She held the knife in one unsteady hand. For a moment only she thought to use it. But that moment passed almost as fast as it had come. Instead she bent and with her other hand she dumped the powder out, shaking it over him and across his mouth and nostrils. She watched the capillaries in his eyes bloom and expand, as if a star had burst suddenly into stardust and thrown itself across the sky.
She pushed away and rose now, running on legs that felt like rubber for the doorway far ahead.
* * *
WILL HAD TIME ONLY TO REACH THE HOUSE THEN THROW DREW inside before he heard the siren. The whoop of it like some air raid signal Will had only heard long ago as a kid.
He left Drew to sit there with his bound legs
across the back hallway floor, his spine against the wall. The house was the same as he had left it, and he crossed now and went again to the window and parted the shades. Out on the road he could see church members moving but they had, at least not yet, figured out which way the threat was coming from. Will turned and looked toward the guards far down at the gate. He saw that two remained and the other two were advancing up the road now, moving toward him.
When Will turned back again, he could see Holly there in the middle of the road. She had likely been the one to sound the alarm and he had to give it to her in some way, she had seen what was going on with him, maybe before Will had seen it himself. Now, as he watched her, he saw her point back to the place she had seen him and Drew last, then she pointed roughly in his direction, signaling which way he’d gone.
“Fuck,” Will said. He let the shades fall and went back through the house and stared down at Drew, and it seemed like Drew was laughing at him. “I’m not dead yet,” Will said.
He took the .38 from his waist, then spun the cylinder and looked in on the bullets. Then he put the gun back in his pants and crossed back through the house. He had seen propane tanks in one place or another on the property. He went to the stove and turned the dial on the range then watched the flame bloom red before turning blue.
He looked around with a wildness and he had to tell himself to calm his nerves and rein himself in a bit. He had to tell himself he was going to get out of here, that it wasn’t over yet. He left the flame going on the range, and he turned and started to go through the cupboards and all the drawers. He knew these people, and he knew their minds, their basic values.
When he came to the emergency candles he brought one up and looked it over, then he bent again and looked some more. When he found the cans of Sterno he set them on the counter. He took one from inside the packaging and pried off the top and looked at the flammable pink gelatin within. Not pausing any more he took a candle and dipped the wick through the flame then brought it to the open sterno. The flame bloomed almost purple. He looked around then brought the Sterno to the bathroom and closed the door.
He came back out of the bathroom and glancing down now he could see Drew’s mood had changed. He was watching Will now with caution. Will took the .38 out again. He flipped the safety off, and he looked from Drew to where the flame still danced atop the range. He was adding time and distance up in his head wondering how they might even make it out of the house, or even up the hill without being shot somewhere along the way.
Will went back toward the front windows then parted the shades again. He saw the guards talking to Holly. He saw her point again in the same direction. The guards stalked off, their weapons raised as they went out of sight between the houses. Will looked down at the knob of the front door and the dead bolt. He reached and flicked the bolt over and made sure it was locked.
He crossed back toward the kitchen, then he turned the flame off and looked it over. He looked back toward the bathroom door and Drew, Drew tracking Will’s every movement. Will turned the knob again on the range. He heard the gas then the click as it caught fire. He tried to blow it out, but it only made the flames dance and move. After a couple seconds of experimenting one way or another with the gas he had still not been able to turn off the flame.
He looked back toward the rear door, and he now saw the shape of one of the guards pass across the curtained window. Will turned and saw out front the other guard approaching, his shape seen across the diffuse curtains Will had parted earlier. Likely they were going house to house and now they had come to this one.
Will turned and looked on the flame again. It was pale and small no matter what he did to it. Turned it up or turned it all the way down, he still did not have what he was looking for. Knowing this, and knowing he was likely dead one way or another, he turned the range all the way down and put a hand on either side of the oven and pulled it out. The sound was loud and each inch he gained seemed to him like a shot fired or a flare launched high into the air that said, here I am.
When he got the oven far enough away from the wall he mounted the counter as quickly as he could and, getting his back to the wall above and his feet braced against the rear paneling of the oven, he pushed. The sound now was unavoidable. Loud as could be. He pushed as hard as he could possibly push and the oven went over and crashed across the floor. He could smell gas. And looking down he saw where the hose had come loose from the wall, and he could hear the hiss of it there in the room with him.
He came down off the counter and crossed to the back door. He saw the shape of the guard in the window and without pausing opened up the door and saw the guard swinging the barrel of his AR-15 machine gun up. Will grabbed it just as the man pulled the trigger, a series of bullets going into the wall just to the right of Will’s hip and leg. Will felt the warm barrel in his hand, and he pulled the man forward into the house where he now fell across Drew’s outstretched legs. Before the guard could turn or get the machine gun around, Will had already taken the .38 from his belt and he struck the man hard across the back of his head and watched his body flatten and go limp.
At the front door, the other guard was now trying the knob. Will could see the mechanism turning then the door rattling as he tried to get the door to open. Will fired one shot into the door at about head level. He heard the guard swear and dive into the gravel beyond, but Will did not think he’d hit him.
Will looked the first guard over, but decided there was no time to try and wrestle the strap of the AR-15 off his shoulder and from underneath his now-unconscious body. Instead, Will lifted Drew up and went out through the rear door of the house and into the open beyond. He had only begun to smell the gas, and now as he came into the open land outside the house he felt almost as if he wore it like a cape around his neck, dragging it forth upon the world.
He had replaced the .38 in the waist of his pants, and he ran with his two hands holding tight to Drew’s legs, just behind the knees, while Drew bounced and moaned, riding on his belly across Will’s shoulder. On his other shoulder Will still carried his rifle, and he ran with a labored gait from the back of one house to the next much the same way he had threaded his way among them earlier.
He could hear the siren now louder than it had sounded in the house. He made it nearly halfway to the church, when a spray of automatic gunfire tore up the earth beside his feet then thudded in a line across the wood of the nearest house. He did not even turn to look for who had fired on him before he cut and went through the passageway between two houses then came to a stop at the far edge.
Drew was heavier than Will had thought and he could not move as he had wanted to. He paused and looked around the gravel roadway at the members of Eden’s Gate that had converged farther down, and he knew he could not run fast enough to get away. He was waiting on that house to blow and it felt like an eternity had passed. He wondered if somehow they had managed to stop the gas, or if they had found the Sterno behind the closed bathroom door. Behind him, he saw now the shadows of three gunmen approaching the place where he’d cut and disappeared between the houses. The sun was behind them. He could see their shapes and he could see the long barrels they carried that were either machine guns or those of shotguns.
He watched their figures only long enough to understand that he could not be there when they arrived, and now, taking a quick look out on the gravel drive again, he sprinted as fast as possible out and up the road toward the church ahead. It was high ground and he knew if he could reach it and get his rifle from his shoulder he might have some advantage over those below who had been summoned by the siren and the sound of gunfire.
He reached the church just as he saw the three gunmen come around the corner and move after him up the road. Without even thinking about it he threw Drew to the ground as soon as they had cover. He came back around to the corner of the church and flicked the safety forward then leveled the rifle and took his shot. He shot the first man just above his chest. Will watched the bullet hit him in the
right collarbone, and then he watched the blood mist and carry on the breeze as the bullet moved through him and exited somewhere past his shoulder blade. He was down in the gravel as soon as Will shucked the casing then pushed the bolt forward again, his eye looking down the scope.
He could hear the man’s cry and he could hear the other men calling to him, but no one dared move to get him from where they’d dove themselves as soon as Will had fired. Down the gravel road Will could see many had hidden in among the houses. He watched the shadows of their movements and, as he ran the scope across the road, he watched a group of five break cover from one house, dashing for another. He shot at them, but he put the bullet low and watched it dig in among the dirt. The church members diving to the ground then scrambling up on hands and knees as they either went back the way they’d come or reached the protection of the next nearest house.
He shucked the bullet casing and loaded the chamber anew. Down in the road the man was crying for someone to come get him. He managed now to roll and get one arm beneath him, dragging himself across the road. The dirt and gravel beneath appeared slick and dark from the blood pouring from his back and front. Will shot at him again and watched him startle. The bullet had gone wide, but Will had placed it a foot in front of him, in the direction he had been going. The man was now too scared to move as he resigned himself to simply lying there, moaning and calling for his friends.
Will shucked the shell casing then, and as he loaded in another bullet, he saw first the shadow of the big man coming around the corner of the church, then the man himself. Will swung the Remington, but it was too late and the big man caught it in his hands and forced it back down upon Will. The rifle held crossways in his hands and the big man pressing the forestock now across Will’s windpipe as both big man and Will went to the ground in a tumble.