“I’m Officer—” The woman paused and then with a smile, extended her hand. “I’m Sam.”
Raela glanced at the hand being offered, her eyes widening at this woman with a man’s name. In charge and important! She had a voice.
“You stand beside him as an equal.” She pointed at Briggs. “Is it because you’ve taken a man’s name?”
Sam laughed and glanced at Lieutenant Briggs.
“My real name’s Samantha, but I go by Sam. Because I like it, not because it’s a man’s name.”
Raela nodded, intrigued by this new concept. “My name’s Raela. If I go by Rae, will I be treated as an equal?”
Lieutenant Briggs grinned, still watching her, but there was pain in his face. “You could go by Sassafras, and we’d treat you as an equal here.”
She cocked her head, squinting at them. “Sassafras?”
“Ignore him,” said Sam, snickering. “My brother’s jokes are as bad as his cooking.”
Brother? Raela cringed. Was Sam forced to have children with him?
“Your men cook?” she asked with wide eyes.
“Some better than others,” said Sam.
“Why are you here?” Lieutenant Briggs moved closer to her. “Do you need help?”
He had a pleasant scent about him. A clean smell like freshly combed cotton. Not like her brothers with their greasy skin smelling like dirt and body odor, or—she shuddered—spit and mint leaves.
“I’m looking for...I mean, I’m trying to find—”
“Mama?”
“Malikye?” she called, looking past Lieutenant Briggs into the darkness.
Stepping around Lieutenant Briggs, she found Malikye on the ground, his hands tied behind his back, legs folded beneath him. Shell casings littered the ground at his feet. He wore a dirty, white dress shirt and black trousers, scuffed shoes that were once shiny. He carried a strange, black pack on his shoulders that she’d never seen before. Wires and tubes and strange things stuck out of it.
In his eyes, Raela saw glints of her dreamy-eyed boy sailor, but they were marred by this horrible distance and—zealousness that had chipped away at those precious moments she’d built with him so long ago.
“What’s going on here?” she demanded as she dropped down beside her son.
He looked sullen and angry, but he wasn’t hurt.
“We caught him and others from your compound shooting down our sulfate aerosol launches,” said Briggs.
Raela shrugged. “I don’t understand.”
“Our balloons. This one tried to blow up our substation. We’ve been trying to catch them for months.”
Sam nodded, pointing at the stretch of land encircling the brightly lit city below. “We’ve staked out this area for a while, gathering evidence, but until we could catch a terrorist red-handed, we couldn’t ID them.”
Raela shook her head, squinting at Briggs and then Sam. Malikye kept his head tilted down, not looking at her now. None of this made any sense.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying, but I get that my son and Nevaeh are involved.”
Everything the Elders told her wasn’t true. She was shaking now.
Sighing, Briggs cast an uncertain look at his sister.
“I know this is a bit overwhelming, Raela, but hear me out,” said Briggs, his voice calm but intense. “Our world is going to die unless we fix what we’ve done to it.”
“You’re the ones killing it with your crazy bioengineering and playing God!” Malikye shouted, glaring at him. “Brother Keith says this demon power that’s lighting your apostate towns is burning up the planet! It’s destroying the soil and poisoning us all! Mama, tell him! We’ve got to stop them before we all starve! We’re soldiers of the Word, Mama! We can stop this! Let me save us!”
Briggs and Sam just stared at each other, but Raela saw the look in Briggs’ eyes.
“Brainwashed,” said Briggs.
Raela watched her son, knowing he’d gone mad, the realization tearing at her. Her innocent, bright-eyed boy who’d once questioned everything had become just like his brothers. Blinded by faith and overwhelmed by what was at stake, shutting the door a little more and a little more, until only a sliver of something unreal was visible.
And it broke her heart.
“Raela, we’re not playing God,” said Briggs, frowning. “We’re trying to survive. The sulfates are working. They’re using them in Europe. In Greenland. Here in the United States, they’re trying it in Arizona, Oregon—Washington State, and are already reporting successes. If we can inject enough sulfates into the atmosphere, we can lower the earth’s temperature. But we have to work as a united front to make this happen.”
She didn’t understand everything he said. Only the words—united front.
“No!” Malikye shouted. “Mama, don’t listen!”
“We did this to ourselves,” said Briggs. “And now we have to fix it. All of us.”
“How?” Raela asked.
Briggs turned to Malikye. “By not shooting down the aerosols we launch and by working together to launch more. Many more. From hills, from cities, from riverbeds, everywhere!”
“All right,” Raela answered. “I’ll try to convince the Elders to listen to you.”
She sighed, knowing they never would. To the Elders, women were ghosts. No, they were property.
Something loud popped.
Sam cried out in pain and grabbed her shoulder, crumpling to the ground. Malikye lurched up from the ground and skittered away.
“Malikye!” Raela cried when she heard the scuffle.
Lights vanished. Shouts and pops echoed, pounding of boots against dry ground. Raela froze.
“He’s escaped, Peter!” Sam shouted. “Find him. Quick!”
Dark figures swarmed the clearing, surging around Raela, voices whispering, footsteps shuffling.
A cry of pain. Sounds of running.
“Malikye?” Raela called, running now.
No one responded.
She fell over something as lights flashed in the darkness. A pile of freshly tilled, red soil.
Raela pushed against the mound to get her footing, but her hand went through the soft earth. And she felt a face.
Frantic, she shuffled backward, pushing away from the hard, cold thing that stared back at her with dead green eyes. Tears flooded her face when a trail of light touched it.
Jorah.
Her heart pounded in her throat, terror chilling her face as she stared at the settled piles of earth arranged in a circle around her. Graves.
From one mound, a skeletal hand stuck out, remnants of a green cotton sleeve clinging to yellowed, brittle bones. Hara had been wearing a green dress on the last day Raela saw her. Before she’d been raptured away.
Sobbing, Raela stumbled backward, colliding with a tall, stony figure that knocked her to the ground.
Dizzy, she stared up at the forbidding, stocky frame of Brother Keith. Thinning brown hair turning grey, his pale blue eyes were wild as torches lit the area, Brother Enoch and his Soldiers of the Word surrounding her.
“Raela, you’ve transgressed the Word,” said Brother Keith, towering over her. “Conspiring against your own people.”
Raela huddled in the dust, a hand over her face, but she felt no shame. She’d done nothing wrong. Like Jorah. And Hara. She remembered when Nevaeh had first turned on her mother. She’d been only ten the night they’d beaten Hara so severely she couldn’t stand up.
All because one of the men in the compound had smiled at her.
“I only came out here to find my missing son, Brother Keith.”
“Take her back to the compound,” he ordered, his voice deep and thick like the swell of thunder. “We’ll discuss this in daylight.”
Two men grabbed Raela and dragged her to her feet, leading her back through the darkness toward the compound.
***
At dawn, Raela was brought before the Elders. Five of them ran the compound and all of them stood before h
er now like a firing squad in the empty white room: Brothers Keith, Enoch, Zebul, Jareb, and Iram. Five old men with thinning grey hair, weak beards, old bodies, and minds beginning those first, cruel turns against them. The men she remembered from her youth, stoic and unwavering men who, one by one, had forced her to carry their offspring. Now, they were as withered as the planet.
Once strong-chinned and firm-chested, their skin sagged around their necks, loosened from their faces as the world tugged with all its might against their unwavering natures. Slight hunching of their shoulders as they prayed for her. Slight slip of facts here, tiny lapses in attention there as they condemned her. Slight shuffling gaits as they bound her. Small mistakes that would grow bigger with time and show in the offspring they produced from their weakened seeds as they continued treating women as cattle.
Raela knew she would outlast them. She wouldn’t end up raptured like Jorah and her mother.
But the worst was yet to come, she realized when she saw Malikye among the Elders and the other men. Her bright-eyed little dreamer with his mop of thick hair and big smiles had turned on her, blaming her for his capture, blaming her for this heresy.
It was a knife in her heart.
Her pride and joy stood with a hard face and dry eyes as Brother Keith beat her with a rawhide strap. Lash after lash shredding her blue cotton dress, laying down bloody stripes across her back and legs and shoulders. All Raela could think about was Mali’s little paper boat drifting away on the shrinking Mississippi, which now only took steps to cross, disappearing toward the ocean.
Gone forever on the tides.
***
Raela floated in and out of consciousness. When she awoke in her bed, Sebat and Tabbi were beside her with cold compresses and unsympathetic stares. With stiff movements, Raela staggered out of bed in the long, narrow bunkroom she and her young children shared with Carmi, Tabbi, and Sebat. She sighed, her eyes welling with tears. And once Jorah.
Austere with white walls and walnut floors, simple wood bed frames, a handful of straight-backed chairs, and nightstands. The only color in the room was the veils hanging on hooks beside blue cotton dresses. The air smelled like antiseptic and floor wax.
“Brother Keith said you’re to study the Word sunup to sundown for an entire month,” said Sebat as she straightened crisp white linens on the bed beside Raela. “I’m to verify it, too. Otherwise we’ll both be beaten.”
Raela sat down in a chair and laid a hand to her head.
The welts covering her body throbbed with every breath, every beat of her heart, the tightening skin pulling and aching as it healed. She picked up the Book from her nightstand. There were no other books in Nevaeh but the Word.
She stared down at the Word, bound in black leather, and opened it to the first page. It had two words: The Word. Beneath it in small letters were two sentences: Excerpts of the Holy Bible as Transcribed by Brother Moses Keith. September 1, 2019. Nevaeh, Kentucky.
Excerpts no older than Brother Keith.
She remembered Mother’s butterfly in the margin. And knew she could never believe in these things again. It was time for this book to disappear forever.
Gritting her teeth, she glanced over at her three young children’s beds. Seven-year-old Imri lay sleeping beside his four-year-old brother Nicolas.
A horrible cold chill raked her heart when she saw Saphir’s bed was empty.
“Where’s Saphir?” Raela demanded, grabbing Sebat’s arm.
Sebat’s gaze fell to the floor. “She’s disappeared.”
“NO!” Raela shouted. “No! They treat us like cattle, giving us no voice. We remain silent and squeeze out children like yams while old men destroy our planet! All in the name of The Word?”
“But we do escape this place eventually, Raela!” Sebat cried in a low, desperate voice as she gripped Raela’s arm. “We can be raptured like Jorah!”
“Jorah?” Raela said with a hiss. “Raptured away like Jorah?”
Sebat nodded, grinning now.
Raela was done. She was leaving. She’d take Imri and Nicolas and she’d find Saphir. And she would see this place destroyed.
“I found Jorah in a ditch beyond the compound,” said Raela. “In a shallow grave beside my mother, Hara.”
Sebat’s eyes overflowed with tears, her voice breaking. She shook her head. “No, not Jorah!”
Raela inhaled sharply, forcing herself to continue. “There is no rapture, Sebat. Just old men and death when we are no longer useful to them. We must save ourselves. Now.”
Sebat collapsed into her arms, sobbing. “The time is now, sister,” said Raela in a quiet voice.
Sebat pulled herself together and nodded, tears rushing down her cheeks. “Tell me what to do.”
From the doorway, her other sisters crowded into the room as Sebat helped Raela dress.
“There’s a city an hour’s walk from Nevaeh,” said Raela. “They’re fighting this earth change and they have a plan. A plan our Elders have been sabotaging. We’re going to help the city people.”
She reached out to Carmi and pressed her hand to the young woman’s swollen belly. “And we’re taking back control of our bodies.” Raela turned to the other women. “Right now, we must make a stand. All of us together, or this will fail. All of you must agree, so tell me now if you plan to be weak.”
Murmurs rippled through the room, faces turning pale, worried expressions furrowing brows and deepening grimaces until the room fell into an intense silence. Raela smiled. Acceptance.
“We must leave. Now,” said Raela. “That means we must leave our older boys behind. You must have the courage to save yourself first.”
Forgive me, Malikye, she whispered.
Heads nodded. Tears threaded down pained faces. They were all mothers in this room, and Raela knew what she was asking of them. But it was the only way to stop this.
“Where will we go?” Sebat asked.
“Who will take care of us?” Carmi asked, leaning against Tabbi.
“We’ll take care of ourselves,” said Raela, “and each other. We’ll learn and work together as a force to save our world.”
She moved to her two little boys and woke them, Sebat helping her dress them.
“All right,” said Raela, turning to the roomful of women. “Get to all the women. But…as you do, gather every one of these.” She held up their book of the Word. It was just a book.
And it had no more power over her.
“The Book?” Carmi asked, her voice growing soft.
Raela nodded. “Gather them from every room in the compound. Hide them in your skirts, under laundry, with dishes—and bring them to the barn. Where Brother Keith keeps his vehicles.”
Everyone agreed, dispersing in silence, taking her two boys with them as Raela prepared herself. Her heart pounded wildly as she started a slow walk down the corridor toward the other buildings.
For Jorah, for Hara—for herself—she had to fix this, once and for all.
***
It took hours, but the women of Nevaeh gathered all the books, from every nightstand and trunk in the compound as they went about their chores, bringing them to Raela in secret.
She stacked them in the straw by the metal vehicles rusting and ticking under musty tarps. Sunlight filled the cracks and crevices of the old barn’s grey, pocked planks, casting dusty trails of light through the dark outbuilding as she pushed straw up against the stacks of books. Piles of straw covered the floor, drifted into corners, and clung to everything in the old storage barn. The heat took her breath, but she kept working.
She knew what lay under those piles as she shifted loose strands, their dry, reedy scent reminding her of the autumn harvests when corn husks and brittle, greying stalks were cut down to prepare for the next planting.
The rasp of rough wood against her fingertips startled her. She dug deeper, straw shifting like sifting wheat until she uncovered a crate painted with the word Ammunition.
Crates and crates of it lined th
e walls, hidden in the straw, stacked in lofts above, stowed inside the old vehicles. A rusty red can sat near one of the tarps and Raela picked it up, dribbling the acrid liquid through the straw, across the tarps, and over the stack of books.
Trembling, she backed out of the old barn, pausing at the door. She glanced outside to make sure she was alone. No one came here during daylight.
She reached into her apron pocket, sliding out her black leather book. And a lighter she’d picked up while cleaning the men’s dorms.
Snick, snick, snick, her thumb spun the lighter.
Wheel rasped against flint, pungent smell of fuel wrinkling her nose.
Snick, snick—a blue flame burst across the dull silver surface with a whispered growl.
Raela held the flame to the Word. Brother Keith’s word. That’s all it was.
The red-gold flames licked over the cover, consuming it as Raela carried it to the pile. And dropped it.
She scurried to the doors, watching the books burn. When the flames turned blue and white, they leaped and danced across the straw and the crates and the ammunition.
Raela yanked the veil off her head, threw it into the flames, and closed the barn door.
***
Oily thick smoke billowed out of the barn as Raela walked away, dry boards and straw igniting like tinder. It went up in minutes, engulfing the barn in waves of fire.
She ran toward the gates as the bell clattered three times through the compound. Fire!
As the men rushed to the barn, the women huddled at the compound entrance. Raela ran toward them as the women pried open the gates.
Two men who stood guard forbade them to leave, but Raela and Sebat pushed past them, the others streaming out of the compound as the ammunition began exploding like popped corn.
Elders and brothers dropped to the ground, covering their heads as the women ran east.
Raela grinned as they kicked up dust on the long, desolate trail. Out of the heat that shimmered across the distance, Sam and Lieutenant Briggs appeared, with dozens of people in blue uniforms.
Fiction River: How to Save the World Page 19