After the Fire

by Will Hill

  The silence that settles over the crowd is total and terrible. For a seemingly endless moment, Jacob doesn’t respond; he just stares at me, his face crimson, his chest rising and falling visibly beneath his denim shirt. Then – far more quickly than I would have thought possible for someone so fat and out of shape – he spins to his left and clubs Lucy across the face with his clenched fist, lifting her off the ground. She flies through the air, her limbs loose and trailing behind her, then hits the ground in a heap and starts to shriek.

  “NO!” The scream leaves my mouth as I dive forward, ready to sink my fingers into the soft jelly of Jacob’s eyeballs and rip them out of his head.

  I almost make it.

  Almost.

  Lonestar tackles me in mid-air, slamming me to the ground and driving all the oxygen from my lungs with a noise like a bursting balloon. My head slaps the desert floor and I see whole constellations of stars as he drags me to my feet and wrenches my arms behind my back. Bear sprints over and between them they lift me easily off the ground, holding my wrists and ankles tight. I swear and curse and scream for them to let me go, let me go for The Lord’s sake, but they just carry me across the shooting range without a word.

  My Brothers and Sisters almost fall over themselves to get out of the way, each and every one of them making very sure not to meet my eyes as I spit and yell and howl. From beneath the white oak, Father John regards me with an expression of profound disappointment.

  As I’m carried around the corner of the Big House, terrible thuds and screams drift through the warm air as Jacob sets about teaching Lucy the lesson I refused to.

  The two men sitting behind the desk are pale when I finish talking.

  I’m not surprised, even though I’m sure it was exactly what Agent Carlyle – and some guilty part of Doctor Hernandez – wanted to hear about: the violence and punishments and guns. Blood rarely makes for happy endings, but it almost always makes for better stories.

  “When did that happen to your friend?” asks Agent Carlyle. His voice is low and tight.

  “Three days before the fire,” I say.

  “So that was the last training session The Lord’s Legion ever had?”

  A shiver races up my spine, because I hadn’t thought about it like that. “Yeah,” I say. “I guess it was.”

  “You told me people weren’t punished for breaking the rules,” says Doctor Hernandez. There’s something in his voice that’s almost childish, like a teenager trying not to sulk, and it makes me want to laugh out loud. “You told me that the men and women of The Lord’s Legion weren’t afraid. Why did you say that?”

  I shrug. I could tell the truth – that I didn’t trust him when he asked me and that I still don’t entirely trust him now – but what good would that do me?

  He glances at Agent Carlyle with an expression that – just for the briefest of moments – looks weirdly like jealousy, then scribbles in one of his notebooks for a long time. When he finally returns his attention to me, his neutral mask of professionalism is firmly back in place.

  “What happened to you?” he asks. “Afterwards, I mean.”

  “Bear and Lonestar locked me in my room,” I say. “I thought I’d be taken up to the Big House as soon as training was finished, but that didn’t happen. Bear let me out when the bell rang for dinner.”

  “Why do you think you weren’t punished?”

  I shrug. “Maybe Father John thought it would look bad, me being one of his Future Wives. Or maybe he was still deciding what to do with me when everything else started to happen. I don’t know.”

  Doctor Hernandez makes a note, then nods. “You’ve mentioned the Centurions several times now,” he says. “Can you tell us about them?”

  I nod. “It was the name Father John gave the four most trusted members of the Legion.”

  “He had a strange way of showing how much he trusted them,” says Agent Carlyle. “In the end, I mean. But I guess you know that better than anyone.”

  My heart leaps in my chest. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about what happened in the Big House,” he says. “During the fire. What you saw.”

  Doctor Hernandez frowns. “Okay,” he says. “I think we should—”

  “I didn’t go into the Big House during the fire,” I say.

  Agent Carlyle narrows his eyes. “You’re sure about that?”

  “I’m sure.”

  He stares at me. I force myself not to look away.

  Stay calm, whispers the voice in the back of my head. He doesn’t know. There’s no possible way he can know. So just stay calm.

  “Fine,” he says eventually. “If you say so, then I believe you.”

  “Be careful,” says Doctor Hernandez, his voice low.

  Agent Carlyle nods, then smiles at me. “Your father was a Centurion,” he says. “Correct?”

  I frown. “Who told you that?”

  “That doesn’t matter right now.”

  “It matters to me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the thought of people talking to you about my family makes me nervous.”

  “Are you—”

  Anger bubbles through me. “I’m not stupid,” I say. “Maybe you think I am, but I’m not. The only people who could have told you anything about my dad after he joined the Legion are the ones who left during The Purge. Everyone else is dead.”

  Agent Carlyle nods. “Apart from your younger brothers and sisters,” he says. “And you.”

  I stare at him for a long moment, because this was a really shitty thing for him to do. It goes without saying that he knows more than he’s saying, that both of them do, and that’s pretty much okay because I know a lot more than I’m telling them. But to throw the memory of my dad at me like that – because if they know he was a Centurion then it’s a safe bet that they also know he’s dead – is just cruel.

  “Nobody can tell me anything about my mom but you want to talk about my dad?” I say. “That doesn’t seem fair.”

  “No,” he says. “I can see how it wouldn’t.”

  “I told you I don’t have any information on your mother, Moonbeam,” says Doctor Hernandez. “Don’t you believe I was telling you the truth?”

  I shrug.

  “Okay,” says Agent Carlyle. “So are you saying your father wasn’t a Centurion?”

  “You clearly already know,” I say. I’m trying to keep the frustration that is barrelling through me out of my voice but I’m not at all sure I’m succeeding. “Why do you need me to say it?”

  “I’m more interested in why you won’t,” he says.

  “Okay,” says Doctor Hernandez. “I’m going to ask you both to take this down a couple of notches. A robust discussion can be healthy, but being combative isn’t going to help anyone.”

  “Sorry,” says Agent Carlyle, but I’m staring into his eyes and I know he doesn’t mean it.

  “My dad died fourteen years ago,” I say.

  He nods. “I know he did. I’m very sorry.”

  “So why do you care whether he was a Centurion or not?”

  “I’m interested in whether or not it changes how you think about them.”

  “It doesn’t,” I say. “My dad was one of the original Centurions, when Father Patrick first established them. They were different then.”

  “Different to what they were like after Father John took over?”

  I nod. “They changed after The Purge.”

  “But you said it was just the name for Father John’s most trusted servants,” says Agent Carlyle. “Even though they were the only ones allowed to carry guns and they watched Jacob Reynolds assault your friend Lucy without doing anything about it and physically dragged you to your room and locked you in when you hadn’t done anything wrong.”

  I shake my head slowly. The frustration is spreading through me like a forest fire, threatening to burn out of control. “Why don’t you just tell me what you want me to say? It would be so much quicker and eas
ier.”

  “That’s not what anybody wants,” says Doctor Hernandez, “and I’m sorry if that’s the impression you’re getting from this session. We want you to tell us what you remember, Moonbeam, what you think and what you feel. We’d like you to tell the truth, as often as you feel able to, but the last thing we want to do is put words in your mouth.”

  I’m suddenly on the verge of tears.

  Doctor Hernandez is looking at me with an expression so gentle and sympathetic that it makes me want to scream and Agent Carlyle is looking at me like I’m not really an actual person, like all I am is a human-shaped folder full of information he needs to extract, and everything inside me is roaring and raging and I hate them, I hate them both, and I hate everyone else in the whole entire world.

  Including myself.

  SO YOU SHOULD! screams Father John. YOU’RE NO GOOD! YOU’RE FALSE!

  “Can you tell us about the Centurions?” asks Doctor Hernandez.

  “I already have.” My voice is trembling.

  “It’s okay if you don’t want to,” he says. “But you haven’t told us about them. Not really.”

  “I don’t want to,” I say.

  A flicker of disappointment crosses Doctor Hernandez’s face. It’s brief, barely even there at all, but I see it. “That’s fine,” he says. “That’s absolutely all right. We’ll pick this up tomorrow.”

  Agent Carlyle frowns – I guess he doesn’t usually stop asking questions because the subject doesn’t want to answer them – but he doesn’t say anything.

  Doctor Hernandez lifts his bag onto the desk and carefully puts his pens and notebooks back into it. Once everything is how he wants it, he stands up. “See you tomorrow morning,” he says. “I hope SSI goes well this afternoon. I’ll be watching.”

  I can’t help myself. The fire inside me is almost out, but the last few embers are still smouldering.

  “Just like a Centurion,” I say.

  He stops where he’s standing and frowns at me. “Why did you say that?”

  I don’t respond.

  He sits back down next to Agent Carlyle, who hasn’t moved. “If the Centurions were just the most trusted members of The Lord’s Legion, why did you try to insult me by calling me one?”

  “Because I know you think they were bad.”

  He nods, the frown still furrowing his brow. “You’re right,” he says. “That’s exactly what I think they were.”

  “What happened to Lucy was right at the end,” I say. “When everything was coming apart. It wasn’t always like that. They weren’t always like that.”

  Pathetic, whispers the voice in the back of my head. You’re lying to yourself. Who are you trying to protect? Them, or you?

  “I believe that, Moonbeam,” says Doctor Hernandez. “I genuinely do. So why don’t you tell us what they were really like?”

  You have to have rules. That’s what Father John always says. Without rules, things fall apart.

  But it’s not enough to just have rules; you need to make sure people follow them. You can explain how the rules benefit everyone, how they make everyone feel safe and secure, and lots of people – probably most of them – will follow them because they’re decent souls who understand the way a society has to work. But that isn’t always enough, because some people are less decent, less inclined to be selfless. Those people need an incentive to follow the rules, even though it’s obviously the right thing to do, and because you can’t reward someone every time they do the right thing, you have to turn it round the other way. You have to make sure there are consequences for not following the rules.

  That’s how it works inside The Lord’s Legion.

  There are four Centurions at any one time, and there have only ever been six of them, because the title and the responsibilities that go with it are a lifelong commitment. They don’t wear uniforms or badges but everyone knows who they are, and not just because of the guns hanging from their belts or slung over their shoulders. In the years after The Purge, when new Brothers and Sisters still arrived at The Base with reasonable regularity, the first thing they learned was that Father John’s word is final. The second was that the Centurions are the reason why.

  I’ve heard people – usually when they’re angry because they’ve been punished for doing something they shouldn’t have been doing – compare the Centurions to the police on the Outside. My only understanding of them comes from TV shows, back when we were still allowed to watch them, but they don’t really seem like the same thing, to me at least. The Centurions don’t spy on their fellow men and women, or interrogate them, or try to trick them or set them up, and they’re always humble; they never try to set themselves apart. But if something does go wrong, if someone strays from the True Path, even for a moment, they appear as if by magic. And when they do, they dispense The Lord’s justice.

  As interpreted by Father John, of course.

  When I was twelve, one of my Brothers by the name of Shanti beat his four-year-old daughter Echo with a broom handle after he found her sat on the floor in the kitchen, about to drink a bottle of bleach. The resulting noise reached every corner of The Base: the crack-crack-crack of the broom handle, Echo’s high-pitched screams, Shanti’s furious bellowing, and his wife Lena’s desperate, terrified pleas for him to stop, to stop for the sake of The Lord.

  I saw Horizon and Bear sprint across the yard, their guns drawn, and disappear into the kitchen. The bellowing and screaming intensified, then the two Centurions dragged Shanti out into the yard and hauled him towards one of the three metal container boxes that stand in the north-east corner of the compound. He kicked and fought and howled every inch of the way, but Bear and Horizon were relentless; they shoved Shanti into the box, slammed and bolted its door, and ran straight back to the kitchen to check on Echo and Lena, who eventually emerged into the morning sunlight with pale faces and bloody clothes.

  Shanti was left inside the metal box for ten days and nights, with only half a loaf of bread and a two-litre bottle of water each day.

  During the day, when the desert sun is beating down, the boxes get so hot that you can’t touch them with bare fingers. By night, after the heat has bled out of the air with the setting of the sun, they get so cold that you can find frost on their roofs as late as May, or even June.

  For the first day, Shanti ranted and sobbed and hammered on the walls of the box, a relentless drumbeat reminder of what justice inside The Lord’s Legion looks – and sounds – like. By lunchtime of the second day, the noise had been reduced to a weak rattling burst every hour or so. By the third day, the box was silent.

  On the fifth evening, Father John ordered the box opened, took a long look inside, and asked Lena if she wanted him to grant her husband mercy. Lena put her arms around Echo, hugged her tight, and told The Prophet that mercy was for the weak. Father John kissed her forehead, told her The Lord is Good, and ordered the Centurions to lock the box.

  When it was finally opened for good, after almost two hundred and fifty hours, the man who was dragged out into the bright morning light was not the same man who had gone in. Shanti couldn’t walk without assistance, his skin was ghostly white and hanging off his bones like the flesh of a veal calf, and his eyes were sunken and lifeless. He could not meet the gaze of those Brothers and Sisters who had gathered to see him released.

  It took three months for Julia and Becky – under the watchful eyes of the Centurions – to nurse him back to something approaching health. Three months lying in a bed, being spoon-fed thin soup. Three months in which Lena and Echo didn’t pay him a single visit. As soon as he was strong enough to sit upright behind the wheel of a car and work the pedals, Shanti was Gone in a cloud of dust.

  His wife and daughter didn’t even say goodbye to him. Less than a month later, Father John announced that The Lord had chosen Lena to join him in marriage, and she and Echo moved their things into the Big House.

  Most people never got into such serious trouble though, or received such severe punis
hments. The worst I ever got was a three-day fast Father John gave me after I was allowed to go on evening guard duty for the first time and left my post at the Front Gate when I heard a noise in the desert that turned out to be a stray cat.

  The three-day fast was tough, but I deserved it; Horizon talked to me about it for a long time, explaining in his low, gentle voice how the Servants Of The Serpent could have walked right through the Front Gate and into the Big House and murdered The Prophet and it would have been all my fault.

  He was right. And it worked.

  Whenever it was my turn to do guard duty after that, I never left my post for a single second.

  “They starved you for seventy-two hours because you left some arbitrary post for a couple of minutes?” asks Agent Carlyle.

  “They didn’t starve me,” I say. “It was punishment. It was for my own good.”

  Don’t do that, warns the voice in the back of my head. Don’t make excuses for them.

  Doctor Hernandez writes something in one of his notebooks, then gives me the look I think I hate most, the one that makes it so very clear he feels sorry for me. “What other punishments were handed out by the Centurions?”

  I don’t respond.

  Stay calm.

  He puts his pen down. “Moonbeam?” he says. “Don’t you want to answer that?”

  I shake my head.

  Stay calm.

  “Why not?”

  “Because none of this is real to you!” The sudden loudness of my own voice surprises me, but I refuse to be embarrassed. Instead, I enjoy the shock that springs onto Doctor Hernandez’s face, the furrowing of his brow and the widening of his eyes. “None of it! You sit there with all your pens and your notebooks and you write about me while I’m sitting right here in front of you and it’s like you think I can’t see what you’re doing or that I don’t know what you’re writing about, and you’re always so calm and all your questions sound so reasonable and everything is just a puzzle that needs solving to you, even me, and you just don’t seem to get it! I’m not telling you these things to entertain you, or because I think they’re what you want to hear. I lived through them, because this was my actual life! Why can’t you understand that?”