by Laura Bickle
The liquid looked innocuous in the growing light. Tobias didn’t flinch when the needle was jabbed into his arm and the fluid drained away. The medic dabbed at the puncture site with gauze.
“Now you wait.” Alex nodded at him. “And make sure to get a bucket.”
***
I was eager to leave the barn. But also afraid.
I was no longer afraid of the vampires, or even of the soldiers. I was afraid of the shunning of my people.
But I steeled myself. I needed to see this. I had seen the good parts of Amish life, how we cared for one another as brothers and sisters in faith. I had seen the bad, how the Bishop had abused his power. Now I wanted to see my community as an Outsider. As a ghost.
And that is precisely what I was.
Alex and I followed a team of soldiers on patrol. We promised Simmonds that we would not stray from the group. He seemed at odds with himself about our leaving the barn, but in the end he took my word. My word seemed worth more than it had been last night.
And I was not sure that he could spare the men simply to babysit us. Various squads were busily casting crude ammunition from scrap metals and attempting to capture radio signals with antennae perched on top of the barn. Others had gone into the forest to hunt. Two of them had dragged back a doe that very morning.
“At least they seem to be earning their keep,” Alex muttered.
I shot him a warning glance. Whatever uneasy peace these men had developed with our community, I was loath to disturb it. We were outsiders among all, and I knew all too well how easily the majority could turn against the minority.
We climbed aboard a truck painted green and brown. It was open to the weather, like a courting buggy. The driver and one man sat up front behind a partition, and up to eight sat in benchlike seats in the back, facing each other. Alex shuffled me around to sit between him and the partition. It was clear that he did not fully trust the soldiers.
And he trusted the rest of our party even less. Two young Amish men climbed aboard, holding their hunting rifles. One was a young man I’d known all my life, Seth Beller. I was surprised to see him there. I opened my mouth to speak to him.
But he looked away, down at his hands. As if I didn’t exist.
Elijah climbed into the back of the truck beside him, carrying his own gun and a green military-style pouch that jingled like bullets. Elijah met my gaze, but I turned away. I could feel Alex pressing against my side, glaring at him.
“Is there a problem, folks?” one of the soldiers asked.
Alex gestured at him with his chin. “Other than that he tried to kill us, not much of one.”
Elijah shook his head. “No, sir. No problem.”
That response infuriated Alex and mollified the soldier. The truck started up, and we bounced over the rutted field.
Home looked much the same, but I felt as if I didn’t really exist in it. I saw many of my friends and neighbors outside, caring for their animals, doing laundry, carrying water from their wells. But they would not look at me. My next-door neighbor, upon recognizing me, turned her back and pinned a sheet on her clothesline. The woman who had once been my teacher in our one-room schoolhouse, the woman who had taught me to read and looked the other way when a library card fell out of my pocket, similarly looked away from me as we rolled past. The blacksmith, setting up buckets outside his forge, set down his tongs beside the bellows and turned his broad back to me. Frau Gerlach was feeding her chickens when we passed. I glanced at her but she just chattered to her chickens and pretended not to notice.
We passed a house that made me ache. I saw Elijah’s best friend, Sam, cutting wood. My best friend, Hannah, was gathering the pieces in the yard. Elijah and I had intended to go on Rumspringa with Sam and Hannah, before the end of the world happened. Instead, Sam and Hannah had gotten baptized at the same time Elijah had, and were to be married. It appeared they had already done so; Sam was no longer clean-shaven. He was wearing the stubble of a beard around his chin, as married men did.
I couldn’t help myself. I called out to her. “Hannah!”
She glanced up at me in startlement. Shock crossed her face, and her mouth opened. She took a step toward me.
But Sam had set down his ax. He gripped her elbow and led her back to the house.
I cast my eyes down, feeling bereft and foolish.
I was not the only thing missing from the landscape. Two houses were no longer standing. They were reduced to piles of charred beams and ash, burned down to the foundations.
“Vampires?” Alex asked the soldier at his elbow.
The soldier nodded. “We discovered ’em too late at that address. We chased them until morning, then burned them out at dawn.”
I swallowed. Alex and Ginger and I had killed the first vampires that had been unwittingly invited into our community by Elijah. He had thought they were his brothers, but they were not human any longer. There were either more vampires here than we had realized . . . or the land was no longer sacred, allowing any evil to cross in uninvited. I shuddered at that thought.
The soldiers had a list of houses to stop at, like mailmen along their route. At each stop, a soldier knocked at the door, asked for a headcount. He took a brief census of everyone in the house, asked if anyone was ill, and went on to the next.
They had to make a stop at the graveyard, too. The graveyard was larger than I remembered, with disturbed earth. There were fresh markers and at least a dozen hills of unsettled soil.
The truck stopped and we clambered out. I traded sidelong glances with Alex. He and I had followed the Hexenmeister’s prescriptions for dealing with the dead: staking, then cutting off the heads and burning the bodies. If garlic was handy, that was a bonus.
“You’re still burying the dead?” Alex asked.
“The regular dead, yes. But we check on them. Make sure they’re well and truly in the dirt. Herr Stoltz asked us to meet him here. Said he saw something strange.”
The old man was sitting in a buggy beside the graveyard. Wheezing, he stepped out of the cab and down to the ground. I noticed right away that the buggy was pulled by a familiar white horse. I ran to Horace and rubbed his nose. He chuffled at me in delight. Though the Hexenmeister had conscripted him for buggy duty, the old man had clearly been compensating by overfeeding him. Green grass stained his white hide.
I did not speak to the Hexenmeister. I did not want to put him in obvious danger of defying the Bann in front of other Plain people. I’d already put my parents under the Elders’ critical eye after walking brazenly into my house. There was no point in continuing to endanger those I loved.
A gray shape flowed from the buggy to the ground. I heard clicks and the shuffling of guns behind me.
“No!” I said, casting my arms out. I was well aware of how fearsome he looked. “Don’t shoot him.”
Fenrir bounded up to Alex, then to me, slobbering all over our faces. I smiled and stroked his sides.
“Where’d you get the . . . ah . . . dog?” a soldier asked.
The Hexenmeister shrugged. “He showed up awhile back. He’s a good dog.”
Fenrir wagged his tail, wriggling his entire backside in good humor.
The soldier gestured to the graveyard. “Tell us what you see.”
Herr Stoltz leaned against his cane. “I see nothing. But the animals do. Let me show you.”
He led Horace to the graves. Horace docilely stepped over the old, settled mounds and most of the new hillocks of dirt before stopping before a fresh grave. He refused to step over it, shying away and stepping around. I knew what that meant.
“Mark that grave,” Herr Stoltz said.
I glanced at the headstone. It belonged to a widower in his eighties. That he could have died during the simple shock of these events was no surprise.
A soldier came forward with a can of spray paint and painted a large red X on the dirt. We repeated this process with the rest, and Horace was as pliant and docile as a horse could be.
“I don’t get it,” one of the soldiers said.
Herr Stoltz nodded to himself. “The animals know when something is amiss. A white horse is a particularly pure creature. He will not walk over the graves of the restless dead.”
“So . . . it’s sort of like dogs sensing earthquakes?”
“Ja, it is much like that.”
“Doesn’t seem very . . . scientific.”
“My boy, there is nothing scientific about this pursuit.”
Fenrir crept to the graveyard, his nose to the dirt. He wound around the simple grave markers. I followed behind him, watching. He paused at the spray-painted grave and began to dig. I stepped aside as he threw up clods of loose dirt.
The soldiers’ hands flexed on their guns. “There’s a vampire down there?”
“Ja, I believe so. And the dog thinks so too.”
Fenrir dug to the depth of his back hips in the dirt and retreated, growling. I brushed the dirt from his fur and peered into the grave.
I had the sense of looking into a dark corner behind a shutter where a spider had made a home. Thin filaments of cobwebs crossed the edges of the grave, spun silk clinging around the egg sac of a corpse.
One of the soldiers swore. He tried to push the gossamer filaments aside with the barrel of his gun, but the threads clung. Another man brought shovels from the truck, and they pulled the sticky mixture of milky material and dirt away to reveal a corpse at the bottom of the hole, surrounded by the fragments of a smashed coffin.
I had seen many dead bodies. Plain people didn’t preserve their dead or install them in concrete vaults. We washed and dressed them straightaway, and put them in the ground as soon as possible in simple wooden boxes, buried with their feet facing east. Even in that short time, I had seen cheeks grown sunken and smelled that soft scent of decay that begins to cling to bodies dead from natural causes.
This was not such a corpse. It lay on its side in a fetal position. Its black hat covered its head, and its hands were tucked in the dirt and splinters, away from view.
“Burn it,” the Hexenmeister breathed.
One of the soldiers led Herr Stoltz away, mindful that the old man not trip over clods of dirt. I was heartened by that bit of tenderness.
I glanced back at Elijah and the other Amish man. They stood at the edge of the grave, the knuckles on their rifles white. They knew that man, as well as I did. And they knew that what they were doing was not a proper burial according to the Ordnung.
I wondered how they had decided which rules to follow and which to ignore. Elijah had been baptized, joined the church, and then chose to rebel. In the eyes of the Ordnung, his sin was worse than mine, the rebellion of an unbaptized woman who had not wholly agreed to follow the path of the Lord. And I felt a pang of jealous anger that he was not shunned the way I was.
I turned back to see a soldier uncapping a metal container that smelled like gasoline. He poured it into the grave, and the fumes shimmered in the cold air. Another stood away, struck a match, and threw it into the hole.
The flames rose up in a fwoosh. I crept closer, wanting to make well and truly certain that the body was alight. Through the smoke and orange flames, I could see the body curling in on itself. I hoped that he would burn peacefully.
A skeletal hand reached up, snatched the blazing hat from his face. Black eyes burned from a pale face, the wrath as palpable as the heat.
“Watch out!” I cried. “It’s—”
“It’s coming out!” Alex echoed my thought. He pulled me away from the conflagration. I reached down to pick up one of the abandoned shovels. Pure habit now. Instinct.
Bullets chewed into the dirt, obliterating any speech. I flinched back from the sound of the guns, but not the burning creature clawing its way out of the pit.
Its eyes fixed on me. And it lunged for me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I knew, in daylight, I was just as vulnerable as any other human.
But the vampire was vulnerable in daylight, as well. I could see it smoking and withering.
It gained purchase on the edge of the grave and leaped toward me, but I was ready.
We were ready.
Alex had snatched up one of the other shovels. Before the creature’s steaming hands could reach me, he’d slammed the shovel into its chest. The vampire snarled, and Alex flung him to the dirt. He pressed all his weight behind the shovel, forcing the point through its ribs, splitting them open under the sharp point of metal so that the wooden shaft impaled him.
I didn’t hesitate. I rushed to Alex’s side with my own shovel. With all my strength, I slammed the point of the shovel down on the vampire’s throat. I saw a glimmer of something human in its expression. Something familiar. But that didn’t stop me. I put my foot to the shovel, feeling it split sinew and bone. I tried to imagine digging through a recalcitrant tree root to plant a new garden.
I felt the creature moving under me, but the soldiers’ shovels were sharp. The old man’s head split off, like the head of a daisy from a stalk. It rolled three feet, coming to rest next to the boots of the soldiers. Its hair was still on fire, smoldering in the sunshine.
The soldier looked from the head to me, Alex, and back again.
“Nice work, you two.”
Behind them, Elijah stared at me, blinking.
“God looks kindly upon those who do his dirty work,” I murmured immodestly.
Pride was a terrible sin, but I allowed it to flicker through me, just that once.
It felt warm.
***
The soldiers treated Alex and me differently after that. I expected them to shrink away after that display of brutality, to treat us as if we were animals. Indeed, violence was something to be ashamed of. It was not a quality cultivated in Plain people.
But to the soldiers, it was as if we had completed some rite of passage. They offered me cigarettes, which I declined, and began to laugh and joke with grim humor about the corpses they were finding. They offered Alex a pistol and instructed him on how to use it. They set a can out on the edge of a fence post and cheered when he was able to shoot it off.
These things did not interest me. I felt the Hexenmeister’s smile on me, and that meant more to me than the approval of the soldiers.
Fenrir was not fond of guns. He leaned against my side as I walked through the graveyard, running my fingers over the stones of the newly dead. I recognized all of them, of course. I saw all the names of the Hersberger family. Before we had been placed under the Bann, I had personally plunged stakes in their hearts and taken their heads.
Beyond them, I saw two other families, parents and children. I paused to pluck some late-growing weeds away from the stones. These were the families who had been burned in my absence. Odd that I felt some kinship to the soldiers in this terrible work.
“Katie.”
I looked up. Elijah stood above me.
I turned away. “I am under the Bann. If you are a righteous member of the church, you should not speak to me.” More than that, I didn’t want to speak to him. I felt incredible wrath toward him.
It was best that we did not speak.
“Katie, I wanted to say that I’m sorry.”
My brows drew together, and I plucked more viciously at the weeds. “What for?”
“For . . . for everything. For trying to push you into baptism and marriage. For letting the vampires in. For turning you and the Englisher in to the Elders. I . . . I did wrong.”
“According to the Ordnung, you did right.”
“Ja, but . . .” He stared down at the rifle in his hands. “I am not wholly convinced that the Ordnung is the only right.”
I waited for him to continue.
“I could not have lived with myself, knowing that I caused your death. No matter what kinds of sins you committed, they were not for me to judge. You will stand before God in your time, and so will I. I can never make up it up to you . . . what it must have been like to be Outside.” I could tell that his eyes still r
eflected the violence I’d shown him.
I plucked the leaves from a piece of ironweed. The thorns stung my fingers. “It was hard. And bloody. And we lost Ginger.”
“I’m sorry.”
I said nothing.
“I just . . . wanted you to know. I was wrong. It may take a whole lifetime to make it up, but . . .”
I shook my head. I didn’t like this kind of talk. It was too close to suggesting that he and I would have some kind of relationship. “I don’t want you to make it up to me,” I said. “I want you to simply . . . look after my family, as best you can.”
He nodded. “I will.”
I looked up at the sun in the sky and the purple ironweed in my hands. I had known the harsh dirty work of manual labor. But equally hard was the emotional work of faith. Repentance and forgiveness.
I looked at Elijah, feeling my anger dissolve. There was no point to holding on to the hate. “I forgive you.”
He lowered his head, and I could see tears in his eyes. “Thank you, Katie. Thank you.”
This time, when I walked away from him, it was without love and without hate. It was with a profound sense of peace that I knew didn’t come from my own heart. It came from God.
***
“There’s a problem.”
When we returned to the barn, Simmonds was waiting for us. His arms were crossed over his chest, and I could tell by the dust on his boots that he’d been pacing.
“What’s wrong?” Alex asked.
“Your serum.” Simmonds jabbed a finger toward one of the stalls.
We rushed to the stall, peered inside. Tobias was lying on a sleeping bag, glossed in sweat. He was very still. The medic was crouched beside him, pressing a stethoscope to his chest.
“Is he sick?” I said.
“No. He’s not sick,” the medic said. “Not anymore. Now he’s dead.”
I stared at the body. He had been incredibly alive, just a few hours before.
“What happened?” Alex demanded.
“He started off sick. Ralphed his breakfast up in a bucket. Then started vomiting blood. He spiked a fever of a hundred and five, and then lost consciousness. He didn’t wake up.”