by Urban Waite
Will tried to kick out, but his legs and knees landed in awkward places. The man was at least a half foot taller than Will and probably had fifty pounds on him. And as Will fought to free himself he could feel the man was muscle and sinew and not much else. With his hands Will tried to push the rifle up off his throat, but it was like trying to bench press several hundred pounds and the most he could get was a half inch before the man forced the rifle down again.
Will started to lose consciousness. He could see the black beginning to spot his vision. His mind swooned and then for a moment Will’s sight went totally out, but he managed to overcome it. He pushed up on the rifle and felt the man rise a little. Will was left for a second to gasp at the air before the big man put his full weight down atop Will’s throat again. The smell of the big man’s breath in Will’s face and the teeth of the man seen bared with the effort of keeping Will down against the ground.
Will could still hear the man in the road calling for his friends, but it was growing fainter now, and Will was not sure if that was because the man was bleeding out, or if it was that Will himself was about to die, suffocated with his own rifle.
When the big man arched his back up, calling out in pain, his face suddenly seen as a web of vein and muscle tissue, Will could only roll and cough, gasping now to get more oxygen within his lungs. The rifle was turned loose now from the man’s hands and as Will rolled and tried to master himself, he watched the big man turn and saw his own hunting knife there in the man’s lower back. Will turned his head and saw Mary May now stepping backwards as the big man swiveled, clawing for the knife.
He was going after Mary May now and he grasped for the knife and missed then grasped for it again. Finally, on his third try, he got his fingers on the hilt and pulled it from his own back, while at the same time making a sound Will had only heard a few times and never from a man. It was animal and tortured and in it Will heard the anger and the hatred building now into certain violence. Mary May backed up even more and the big man advanced upon her, Will’s knife still within his hand.
When Will brought the rifle up and fired, the shot went straight, digging up through the man’s back ribs and exiting through the heart. He fell over almost immediately, turning slightly as he went. And when he landed there was a stillness seen in the body suggesting he would never move again.
Mary May bent down and got the knife and came forward toward Will. He could see the blood spatter on her face and on her clothes. Her collar was open almost all the way down her chest and Will saw how the blood ran from the fresh tattoo then disappeared in the cleavage formed by her bra. Will coughed and still he could not get the oxygen he needed. They were in rough shape, both of them.
Down on the road the man had stopped calling for his friends, but there was the sound now of footsteps making their way up toward them. Will bent and drew the .38 from his waist, then going to the corner of the church again, he fired twice, aiming the gun barrel down the small hill. He snuck his head out for a second and saw how his pursuers had scattered once again and soon were all back in hiding. Will simply looked on the place the man had been, and he saw that they had come and gotten him, and that he might be somewhere now getting the medical assistance he would need.
When Will looked back at Mary May she was waiting for him, kneeling over her brother and looking back at Will. Will stumbled over. He felt weak, but every breath he took seemed to give him new strength. As he moved toward her, he bent and picked up the rifle from the ground then loaded new cartridges from his pockets.
“Where’s John?” Will asked. It was the first thing he said to her and he felt badly that it was not to ask how she was, but he knew they simply did not have the time. She was alive and keeping her that way was what now mattered most.
“Drugged,” she said. “But I heard others back there and I know they’re coming. The siren is even louder out on the road than it is back here.”
Will looked past her to the stand of trees that surrounded the compound. He thought of the hundreds of tattoos he’d seen in that room. He had seen many people, but he had not seen hundreds. He spun and went to the corner of the church again and fired on the first thing he saw; a window in a house halfway down the road shattered then fell inward from its frame.
When he came back to Mary May he reached down and took the knife from off the ground where she had left it. He wiped the blood on his shirt then stuck it back down within his sheath. Next, he brought up the .38 and handed it over to her. “Three shots left,” he said, watching her stand and then take one wobbly step toward him.
“Jerome is still waiting for us?” she asked. She turned slightly and looked in the direction of the far bluff.
“You can barely walk,” Will said. “Can you make it?”
“I have to.”
He looked her over. Her eyes were not tracking right and she was covered in her own blood and the blood of the man Will had shot. “You’ll make it,” Will said. He bent low to pick Drew up off the ground. Will used his legs and hefted Drew upward, feeling the man try and fight against the electrical cords that bound him, and which held the gag about his mouth. Paying little notice to Drew and still high on the adrenaline that had flooded his system, Will told Mary May to go as straight as she could and look for the big nurse log by the roadside. “Jerome will be there.”
“Why tell me that?”
“Because you’re going to need to find him and you’re going to need to tell him how to find us.” Will went to the corner of the church now and with Drew still over his shoulder he peaked out around the edge and several guns opened up on him immediately.
Will came cautiously back to where Mary May had flattened herself to the side of the church. “Go,” Will said. “They’ve seen me and they’ve seen your brother. They don’t know you’re up here and they don’t know which way you’re going. Tell Jerome we’ll be a mile down on the road as he heads toward the state highway.”
She looked at him like she didn’t think any of this was a good idea and Will knew she was right. It wasn’t a good idea. But he knew, too, it was better than anything else they had.
“Go,” he said.
* * *
MARY MAY WAS ALONE. SHE HAD COME AROUND THE BACK OF the church then gone into the trees, running in the direction Will had pointed her. But only about a hundred yards in, with the compound still clearly seen behind her through the tall pines, she began to hear shooting and the yelling of men and women. When she turned, locating first the edge of the compound, then running her eyes across the landscape, she saw the houses farther on. The front of the church was visible as well, with the steeple rising above, and it was there that she saw most of the Eden’s Gate people gathered. And seeing them she dropped and lay in the grass that grew everywhere between the trees.
They were a hundred yards away and though Mary May did not know where they had come from, she could see a great many of them. A few trucks were there, when before there had been none. And many of the people who had arrived carried rifles and guns and were dressed in flak jackets, outfitted as if they meant to go to war.
She watched and saw several turn and move away from her in the direction Will had gone. Soon after she heard gunfire, then farther out the dissonant return of Will’s rifle, quickly firing over and over again. For the fifth or sixth time, she thought to turn and go back toward him, but she knew there was little she might do.
She carried with her the .38 revolver, three shots left within the cylinder. She looked down at her father’s gun. She knew if Will and Drew were to make it out of there and to the road that ran farther up along the bluff, she was going to need to make it first to Jerome. If Will came out on that road and Jerome was not there, or Will even had to wait a minute, it would not take long for Eden’s Gate to surround and quickly overpower him. Like her, Will’s advantage only lasted as long as he kept moving. And if she didn’t move—if she didn’t run, and run now—Mary May, Will, Jerome, and possibly even her brother, Drew, were all as goo
d as dead.
She started running, moving away from the lake in the way Will had told her to go. Any effect of the drug was gone now, either sweated from her system or expunged by her own adrenaline. She was nearly at the dense trees that climbed the bluff when the first bullet round hit the nearest trunk. She turned only briefly and saw the ten or so members of Eden’s Gate advancing toward her, and who had no doubt seen her running straight on toward the bluff and the road above that she hoped to use for her escape.
By the time she came to the incline of the hill and started to climb, the bullets from six or seven guns were digging up the earth all around her and the trees were coming apart in a hail of wood chips and falling branches. But then in an instant all the gunfire and the sound of the bullets digging up the woods completely stopped, and for a half second, she thought the world had been sucked up and away into the vortex of some tornado that had rendered the world mute.
The light of the explosion hit her first, followed closely by the sound and Mary May turned to see the mushroom cloud expanding, and moving ever higher there above the Eden’s Gate compound. She’d been scrambling up the hillside with her hands outstretched on the incline and her feet digging beneath her as she climbed. She looked back down the way she’d come and saw between the thin pines below a new column of smoke rising to the sky. She moved over until she could see what was left of a house. Just a dark black patch in the otherwise brown and green expanse below. Will had told her nothing of a house exploding and for longer than she should have, she stared at the place the house had been and wondered now whether Will and Drew in some way had been within.
She had little time to dwell on any of this. She could not explain what had happened and though she was worried, she had to believe Will and Drew had not doubled back somehow and made a final stand within the house. Looking now, she saw several of the church members had followed her into the forest and while they had turned, taking in this new disaster, Mary May cut across the slope, moving with the swiftness of some mountain animal. And now as she moved up she could see she’d increased her lead as the slope began to round.
The sun was still out, but it had begun to lower toward the horizon and the chill of the place could be felt now against her skin. The shirt John had ripped down the middle hung open and the exposed skin of her chest was covered in a collection of sweat, blood, ink, and the dirt of her own escape. Sometimes she moved fully upright, but mostly she had climbed with her hands outstretched, the gun wedged down the back of her pants as she went.
She chanced one more look back the way she’d come, letting her vision pan across the slope. Nothing could be seen but the wavering flow of wind as it moved through the branches above. No sound of rocks cut loose by those that followed her. No gunshots. No shouts or voices. The place seemed eerily normal to her, and it was this sense of normality among the more current chaos that frightened her most. She took one last look back across the path she’d made, then moved, hands outward on the slope again. All the while she thought that if she’d heard just one shot fired far out there in this landscape of forest and lakeshore, she might have felt some relief for Will or for her brother, but that she had not heard anything at all now scared her more than all that had come before.
* * *
SHE CAME OVER THE TOP OF THE HILLSIDE WITH A CHILL SWEAT across her brow and down along her exposed clavicle. Through the trees she saw the road ahead. She pushed herself up and went into a full run. She was midway to the road when she saw Jerome. He was just south of where she’d thought he’d be, closer even than she’d hoped.
Jerome met her halfway and she fell against him and he held her for only a moment before turning her toward the ancient Oldsmobile. “Where’s Will?” he asked. He looked now to the trees and forest she had herself run from. “He isn’t with you?”
They reached the car and she let him help her with the door then help her to sit within. She was breathing hard and the sweat felt cool on her skin now in a way it hadn’t before.
“What about Will? I heard the explosion. I came out to the edge of the hill but I couldn’t see anything but smoke rising up above the trees. Is he okay?”
This was a hard question for her. She hadn’t had time to process it, she hadn’t had much more of a thought in her head than to simply escape. Run. Climb. Get the fuck out of there. But now, with Jerome waiting on her she did not know what to say. She looked back toward the forest. She almost wanted to see Will and her brother there. Will making his own escape, running, trying to find them where they sat. But no one was there. Just the wind through the trees—just the emptiness of the forest as it stared back at her. “I’m not sure Will made it,” Mary May said, her eyes still on the forest.
“He’s dead?”
“I don’t know.” She turned away from the forest. She looked to Jerome. She looked on the road ahead. “We need to go,” she said. “We need to get out of here before we can’t get out of here at all.”
He looked at her, and then he closed the door. He came around the front of the car then pulled his own door open and sat in the driver’s seat. He leaned forward and cranked the engine.
“I told Will to get my brother,” Mary May said. “But we couldn’t all get out together. Will and Drew went one way and I went the other. Will said they’d meet us down the road. But I’m just not sure if they made it.” She could feel her voice beginning to break a little at the edges. This—being in Jerome’s car—was the first time in nearly a day she had had a chance simply to sit and to reflect on her own existence. To realize how very, very dangerous Eden’s Gate had become.
Jerome hit the gas and they started down the double track. She looked out on the road ahead then turned and looked back at the place where she’d come up over the hill. She wondered about her brother and she wondered about Will and whether either of them were still alive.
* * *
WILL HAD TOLD HER “GO” AND HE’D WATCHED MARY MAY TURN and run toward the stand of trees and that was the last he saw of her.
He held Drew up over his shoulder and the man’s weight alone was almost enough to buckle Will at the knees. But he thought now, you got yourself into this, said you’d go get the brother like a fool. Now what?
He set out in a heavy trot, his boots scuffing across the dirt as he cut down toward the rolling lands just beyond the lake. He came off the small hill where the church sat and ran on into the lowlands, scraped by glacial flows a few thousand years before, but now populated by ferns and trees. Ahead, through the sparse growth of forest he saw where the hillside began, moving unevenly up toward the high bluff and the road that ran atop it, the feel of the rifle swinging on the strap over his shoulder, the weight of Drew upon his other side. No one shot at him or followed him and, still moving, he turned slightly to the side and looked back at the church and Eden’s Gate and he wondered why.
The sound of the trucks froze him right there in place. He turned fully now and looked back toward the compound. Five trucks were rolling in past the gate, the dust moving off them as they went. And as Will watched he knew without a doubt that everything he’d gone through already that day had nothing on what was now approaching.
The trucks came up the drive, winding their way past the houses. Will was a couple hundred yards from the church, standing in the forested flatlands that came up from the lake, his view of the place seen through stands of pine, but the pine trunks were not dense enough to stop the trucks if they decided to turn and go for him.
Ahead, in the direction he needed to go, there was another quarter mile or so before he would reach the protection of the bluff. He was exposed and though he had felt isolated and alone when he had come down from the church and moved past the preliminary makings of the perimeter fence, a feeling of desperate solitude now seemed to emanate up from within his marrow.
Working quickly, Will dropped Drew to the ground then raised the rifle and put the lens to his eye. He could see the trucks still coming, they had almost reached the church. Many
Eden’s Gate members were waiting there and as Will moved the rifle scope to the people, Holly and a few others he recognized, he saw all of them were pointing out across the compound and into the trees to the place he now stood looking back.
He swung the rifle up then bent and grasped Drew and put him back up over his shoulder. The man struggled for a moment but Will simply set off across the lowlands as fast as he could go, jostling Drew across his shoulder as he went. The first shot was heard as it buzzed past a few feet above his head. The next went wide and he saw it dig into a pine trunk to his left. Will cut and moved, veering across the land, trying to get as much forest between him and those who were shooting at him.
When he looked back he could see all five trucks had stopped right there next to the church and men had begun to move out and drop from the truck beds. He watched a distant rifle flare and he heard the shot. The bullet cut across the air a foot in front of him. They had a man like him up there, with a scope and hunting rifle, and Will knew now it was only a matter of time before a shot went true.
Will ran on. He dropped into a small depression between two rolling hills that held a dry creek at the bottom, and when he came back up the opposite rise and turned to look toward the church only two trucks were now parked there. Dust hung in the air and he knew almost without a doubt that the other three trucks were coming for him.
He gained the rise just as another bullet tore up the earth beside his foot, the dirt spraying high across his arm and side. He knew he was going to lose this one. He knew the bullets were getting closer. He came to the top of the rise and he went down the opposite side but he stopped and looked behind him. A bullet cut the air and Will dropped to the ground and with a shout from beneath the gag, Drew went rolling away from him and lay sideways down the hill, still struggling against the cording that wrapped his wrists and ankles.