After the Fire

by Will Hill

  “But some things did?” he asks.

  I nod. “Lessons were cancelled. After The Purge, we started working in the morning and in the afternoon.”

  “Why?”

  “Father John said everything worth learning was in the Bible.”

  Doctor Hernandez makes a note. “What else was different?”

  “The TV got taken away. And the radios, and all the books.”

  “People weren’t allowed to read books any more?”

  I shake my head.

  “Why not?”

  “Because they came from Outside,” I say. “Like the TV programmes, and the songs on the radio. The First Proclamation banned them all.”

  “Specifically?”

  “No. But it became clear really quickly.”

  “The First Proclamation is also what banned everyone except Amos Andrews from leaving the compound?”

  I grimace. He knows I hate that word. “Yes.”

  “And that was the end of The Lord’s Legion actively recruiting?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You and your sisters going into Layfield to hand out leaflets,” says Doctor Hernandez. “Men and women going out into the world and preaching, like your father saw Horizon do.”

  “Yes,” I say. “That all stopped.”

  “Was it common?” he asks. “Before the purge?”

  I nod. “Most people went out. Even Father Patrick himself, he went out at least a couple of times a year. Father John did it a lot after he arrived.”

  “Was he good at it?”

  “I’ve told you what he was like when he spoke,” I say. “I never went with him, but I guess it worked on Outsiders as well. People would always arrive in the weeks after he’d been out preaching.”

  “Was that how he met Jacob Reynolds?” asks Agent Carlyle. “When he was spreading the word of The Lord?”

  I shrug. “I guess so.”

  “So after the purge, there were no new members joining the Legion?” asks Doctor Hernandez.

  “There were still a few,” I say. “Father John told us that The Lord would show anyone who was worthy the True Path, and it would bring them to The Base.”

  “And it did?”

  I nod. “People walked down the road to the Front Gate, like Nate did, having talked to somebody or heard something somewhere. But not many of them. And Father John turned most away.”

  “And the gate itself was bigger? You said it was just planks of wood in Father Patrick’s time?”

  “It got built up after The Purge,” I say. “Father John said it wasn’t strong enough. He ordered the Centurions to start adding metal and barbed wire to it straight away.”

  “So nobody was allowed out and nobody was encouraged to come in?”

  I nod again.

  “So your Brothers and Sisters who were born after the purge—”

  “They don’t know anything about the rest of the world,” I say. “They’ve never seen Outside for themselves, and all they know is what they’ve been told. I can remember it, and I guess Luke and a couple of the others might be able to. But the younger children? No.”

  The two men glance at each other. I watch as they attempt to process what I’m saying, and I wonder what Doctor Hernandez was told when his phone rang in Austin and somebody asked him to come all the way out here – whether he really understood exactly what he and his colleagues were going to be dealing with. He makes a long note in one of his books, then takes a deep breath.

  “Okay,” he says. “What else changed?”

  “The doors being locked at night,” I say. “That started with Father John.”

  “Was it in one of the proclamations?”

  I shrug. “You tell me,” I say. “You’ve obviously read them.”

  He nods. “I’ve read them.”

  “Then why are you asking me what’s in them?”

  “Because facts aren’t the only things that are important,” he says. “Because I’m interested in the answers you give, in what you feel comfortable talking and not talking about. I’m interested in where your boundaries are.”

  My boundaries?

  “So you’re just trying to catch me out?” I ask.

  Easy, whispers the voice in the back of my head. Take it easy.

  Doctor Hernandez’s eyes widen, and his face fills with what is, at the very least, a pretty convincing impression of surprise. “Not at all,” he says. “Don’t ever think that, please. I know there are aspects of what you went through that you don’t want to talk about, and I respect that. Setting boundaries is a good thing. My job is to try and reach a place where you feel able to move those boundaries, where you are able to tell the truth about your experiences, even the ones that right now you don’t want to confront. That will be real progress.”

  I’m really confused. It’s like he’s speaking a different language, one that I don’t understand.

  “So you don’t care if I lie to you?” I ask.

  “I’d like you to tell me as much of the truth as you feel able to,” he says. “And that’s all. I like to think I’ve been consistent on this.”

  Agent Carlyle puts his hand up, like a child who knows the answer to a question. “I’m all in favour of you telling the truth,” he says, a grin on his face. “It makes my life a hell of a lot easier.”

  Doctor Hernandez tries to give him a stern look, but isn’t able to hide a small smile of his own. I just shake my head, in what I hope is a disapproving manner.

  “Let’s get on with it,” I say. “If we’re all finished being comedians, that is?”

  Doctor Hernandez nods, the last traces of the smile still on his face. “Okay,” he says. “So everyone was locked in their rooms at night? Because that isn’t explicitly mentioned in any of the Proclamations, as far as I remember.”

  “Not every night,” I say. “Lights-out was still at ten, unless Father John decided differently, and sometimes the Centurions locked the doors and sometimes they didn’t. But if they did, they didn’t unlock them again till morning.”

  “Was there a pattern to whether the doors were locked or not?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like they were locked one week and then not the next? Or they were locked Monday to Friday and left unlocked at the weekends?”

  I shake my head.

  “So nobody knew from one night to the next whether their door was going to be locked?”

  I shake my head again.

  “Great way to keep everyone obedient,” mutters Agent Carlyle. “Make it look like not locking them in their rooms is an act of kindness.”

  Doctor Hernandez nods, and makes a quick note. “So the Centurions weren’t ever locked in their rooms?” he asks.

  I smile. “No.”

  “Father John?”

  I just about resist the urge to laugh out loud. “Of course not.”

  “The rule didn’t apply to him?” asks Doctor Hernandez.

  I shake my head.

  “Like most of the others,” says Agent Carlyle.

  I shrug. “I guess not.”

  “Were the rules written down somewhere?” asks Doctor Hernandez. “Could members of The Lord’s Legion read them?”

  “The Proclamations were written down.”

  “What about the smaller stuff? The day-to-day stuff?”

  “They didn’t need writing down,” I say. “Everyone knew them by heart.”

  “So how did new rules get put in place?”

  “Father John announced them,” I say.

  “On Sunday mornings? During his sermons?”

  “Not always. Sometimes he just called everyone together.”

  “And announced that he was adding a new rule?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because God had told him to?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you believe that?”

  I stare at him. The seconds stretch out, long and empty.

  Tell the truth, whispers the voice in the back of my head.
Be brave.

  Doctor Hernandez looks at me. “Moonbeam?”

  “I did.”

  “What about now?”

  Images race through my head…

  …my mom in the living room of the Big House, her face bleeding…

  …Honey in the shadows cast by the maintenance shed, her eyes wide with fear…

  …Nate in the darkness of my room, his hands full of forbidden things…

  Be brave, urges the voice in the back of my head.

  But I can’t.

  I’m not.

  I knew – I’ve always known – that the subject of my own Faith, in Father John and the Legion and everything else, would come up eventually. But right now, in this room at this moment in front of these men, it feels like I might just as well cut out my heart and show it to them.

  “I think I’m done talking for today,” I say.

  While I wait for Nurse Harrow to arrive with my lunch, I lie on my bed and try to think – really think – about the situation I’ve found myself in.

  Ever since I woke up in hospital with my hand wrapped in bandages and my mind reeling with panic, I’ve been operating almost entirely on gut feeling, trying to just get through one moment at a time, letting emotions flow through me unchecked…

  …disorientation about where I am…

  …fear about what’s going to happen to me…

  …paranoia about who I can trust…

  …guilt about what I did…

  You have to stay calm, says the voice in the back of my head. You’re stronger than you think. You have to keep going.

  But it’s not that easy. I know the voice is right, but I’ve been running on adrenaline and it feels like my reserves are almost spent.

  I don’t think I can go on like this for much longer.

  Think. Just think.

  I hate it when Doctor Hernandez tries to manoeuvre me, tries to lead me somewhere without telling me where or why, but – despite that – I do believe that he genuinely wants to help me get out of this place and have some kind of life.

  I have to believe it, because otherwise I might as well just tell them I’m not saying anything else and start getting used to the idea of spending the rest of my days staring at these four grey walls.

  I have no idea what a life Outside would be like for me, and I doubt that Doctor Hernandez does either. But he talks about a process and he talks about progress, and I don’t know if it’s because of him or not, but one pretty major thing has changed since the fire, something I really didn’t expect. Which is that the thought of being Outside on my own doesn’t fill me with the same stomach-churning dread as before. Not like it did after my mom was Banished and my head was full to the brim with lies and I was scared all the time. When the Outside seemed almost as bad as the place where I had come to understand I was trapped.

  All right, whispers the voice in the back of my head. That’s good. That’s something.

  I stare at the ceiling and push Doctor Hernandez out of my mind and focus on the man who now sits next to him every morning. I know I have information that Agent Carlyle wants, that he must have realized by now that only I can tell him, and I know that’s his main reason for talking to me. But I don’t think it’s his only reason for talking to me.

  Not any more.

  It might just be wishful thinking, but the wink he gave me after we talked when Doctor Hernandez was out of the room, the little smiles and nods when I reveal something he knows is hard for me, feel like they’re meant to let me know he’s on my side. Or make me believe so, at least. But there’s no point in thinking like that, because I can’t ask him and he wouldn’t tell me the truth if I did.

  Either way, two things haven’t changed. The things I can’t tell either of them: what happened in the Big House during the fire, and what happened the day before it.

  And everything else? asks the voice in the back of my head.

  I told myself I wouldn’t talk about Father John. I told them that I wouldn’t. But I did, and I didn’t die. I’m still here, still breathing in and out.

  So maybe…

  Maybe Doctor Hernandez is right. Maybe it will do me good to talk about the rest of it, to tell as much of the truth as I can bear – about Luke, and Nate, and my mom, and everything else.

  Maybe.

  I know that I’m going to have to talk about the fire eventually. I know it’s what Agent Carlyle wants to hear about, and for all I’m starting to believe – hope – that maybe I can trust him, I don’t believe for a second that his patience is endless. But I can feel the heat of the flames, can hear the roar of the gunfire, and I don’t want to go back there. I really, really don’t. So maybe I can put it off a little bit longer.

  There is a border between truth and lies, a border that Father John always described as a thick black line, solid and immovable. But I’m starting to think he was wrong, like he was about so many things. I think the line is so blurry that at times you don’t even know which side you’re on; like how you can tell the truth but not mention something important, or how you can tell a lie that has some truth in it.

  For example, I told Doctor Hernandez and Agent Carlyle that there were always four Centurions, and that was the truth. But for the year or so before the fire, there were only really three, because one of them was very slowly dying.

  I’ll tell them about him tomorrow.

  Honey and I stand in the yard with the Big House behind us, listening to the wet rattle of approaching death.

  “It’s not going to be long, is it?” says Honey.

  I shake my head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Good,” she says. “Then he won’t be in pain any more.”

  “Let’s hope not,” I say, and I’m almost surprised by how much I mean it.

  I really, really mean it.

  Horizon has been a member of The Lord’s Legion since the very beginning, long before the arrival of Father John and The Purge and everything that came after. I’ve known him for almost my entire life and he has always seemed like a giant to me, in both body and spirit: a towering figure, with a broad back and mountainous shoulders, brown hair that sometimes reached all the way down to his belt, and a thick beard surrounding a mouth capable of unleashing the loudest, most infectious laugh I’ve ever heard. He always seemed larger than life, as though he wasn’t absolutely real – he seemed more like something out of a fairy tale, full of warmth and wisdom and endless kindness.

  The children who grew up inside the Legion have always adored him, and I was no exception. When I was little, my Brothers and Sisters and I used to follow him around The Base for hours on end, clinging to his tree-trunk legs like limpets and demanding to be lifted onto his shoulders, insisting he could easily carry us all at the same time and pleading with him to try.

  He indulged us without a word of complaint, because he was a decent man, a good man. He really was. He was one of the original Centurions Called by Father Patrick, and he was one of the men who locked Shanti inside the box for ten days, but only because it was his duty; I know he took no pleasure in it. After Lena rejected Father John’s offer of mercy for her husband, Alice told me she saw Horizon praying alone in the Chapel, tears running down his face. Julia and Becky nursed Shanti back to health afterwards, but Horizon spent more time with him than anyone else; he spent hour after hour at Shanti’s bedside, spooning soup into his mouth and reading the Bible to him.

  Eighteen months ago, he started to cough.

  At first, Horizon brushed it off when people asked if he was all right. “It’s a cough,” he told them. “It’ll pass.”

  But it wasn’t. And it didn’t.

  It got worse and worse, until half The Base was being kept awake by the racking noise echoing from the Centurion barracks at the western edge of the yard and a trash bag full of blood-soaked tissues was being brought out every morning.

  In Father Patrick’s time, people went down to the medical centre in Layton for anything more serious than Julia and Beck
y could handle – I had my broken arm splinted and placed in a sling there – but that was one of the many things that changed with The Purge, after it was made clear that all doctors are Servants Of The Serpent and all prescription drugs are Government weapons designed to destroy the minds of the True. Despite that, my Brothers and Sisters begged Father John to let Amos take Horizon to the doctor and after two nights of prayer, The Prophet finally agreed. Amos drove Horizon through the Front Gate in the red pickup and returned forty-eight hours later, after an urgent detour to the big hospital in Midland, with news that broke the hearts of everyone who heard it.

  Stage Four lung cancer.

  With intensive treatment, two years at the most. Without it, a year, if he was very lucky.

  People prayed and wept and beat their chests and prayed some more and pleaded with Father John to do something, anything to help him, but Horizon merely smiled and thanked them for their concern and told them he was ready whenever The Lord saw fit to Call him Home. He had no regrets, he said; he had found the True Path before it was too late, and had lived a life he was immensely proud of. When the time came, he would Ascend with a smile on his face.

  And for a while, everything sort of went back to normal.

  Horizon’s booming cough became just another feature of life inside The Base, as regular as the rumble of the generators and eventually so constant that it was pretty much inaudible unless you actually paused whatever you were doing and listened for it. His skin was ghostly pale, even when he’d been out in the sun, and maybe he moved a little slower than he once had, but he still set about each day with his familiar enthusiasm, his smile wide and warm.

  He was dying though. And everyone knew it.

  Following a request from Horizon himself, Father John announced that it was forbidden to discuss the Centurion’s illness within his earshot, and ordered everybody to treat their Brother no differently than they always had. But the cancer hung over everything like a dark cloud, and as the months passed and Horizon began to shrink before our eyes, many of my Brothers and Sisters began to avoid him. It was too painful, they said, too hard to watch him fading away.

  For me, that was the worst part of the whole horrible thing. Horizon never complained, never said a word to anyone, but the hurt was there in his eyes if you were brave enough to meet them and look; the hurt that comes when the people you love turn their backs on you, even if they claim – and, I have no doubt, honestly believe – that they’re doing so because they love you too much to watch you suffer.