After the Fire

by Will Hill

  “Mom?” I ask, because my brain is still in that hazy place between being asleep and awake.

  “It’s Nate,” whispers a voice. “Keep your voice down.”

  “Nate?” I whisper. “What are you doing here?”

  “There’s no time,” he says. “They’re going to come for me, and I have to be gone before they do.”

  I sit bolt upright, my mind clearing as suddenly as if a bucket of cold water has been thrown over me. I can just about see the outline of Nate perched on the edge of my bed.

  “Gone?” I ask. “Where? What are you talking about?”

  He shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “You’re going to hear some things about me, Moonbeam. Things they’re going to say I did. But you mustn’t believe them, okay? Will you do that for me?”

  Gooseflesh breaks out along my arms. “What things?” I ask, and the desperate pleading in my voice makes my stomach churn. “What is this, Nate? What’s happening?”

  “I’m not who you think I am,” he says. His voice is low and slightly choked, like the words are causing him pain. “But I never lied more than was necessary. Remember that, okay? Promise me you’ll remember that.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t…what…”

  He takes hold of my shoulders. “Listen to me,” he whispers. “You’re a remarkable girl, Moonbeam, you’re strong and smart and brave and I’m proud to have been your friend. But I’m not going to be able to protect you any more. So stay close to Father John. Don’t let him forget that you’re promised to him, don’t let anyone ever forget that. And stay away from Luke. He’s dangerous.”

  I stare into the darkness. What does he mean, he won’t be able to protect me any more? I’ve never asked him to protect me from anything.

  “You’re scaring me, Nate,” I say.

  “I know,” he says. “I know I am, and I’m sorry. But I need you to listen to me. There isn’t much time.”

  My heart is racing in my chest, but I try to force it to slow down, to not let panic overwhelm me. “I’m listening.”

  “Good,” he says, and presses two objects into my hand. “Take these. Hide them somewhere nobody will find them.”

  I reach for the torch on my bedside table, but he grabs my hand and holds it tight.

  “No lights,” he hisses. “I don’t think they know I’ve left my room, but I can’t be totally sure.”

  He lets go of my hand and I run my fingers over the objects. One of them is smooth and small and rectangular, the other feels like a plastic bag with something sharp inside.

  “What are they?” I ask.

  “In the bag is a skeleton key,” says Nate. “It will open any door in the entire Base. Any door, Moonbeam. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  An image fills my mind: the metal door in the basement of the Big House, behind which the guns are kept.

  “I understand,” I say.

  “The other thing is a cell phone,” says Nate, and I gasp in the darkness. I didn’t mean to, and he urgently shushes me, but I just couldn’t help it, because phones are completely forbidden. The only one in the entire Base, at least as far as I know, is locked inside a box in the Big House, and it has been used just twice that I can remember: once to call an ambulance after Amber was bitten by a diamondback, and once to get the power restored after some vicious Servant Of The Serpent cut the electricity cable out near the highway.

  “Nate, why are you—”

  “Listen,” he says. “It’s turned off, and you need to keep it that way unless things get bad. I mean really bad. But if they do, press the green button to turn it on and hold down one. There’s a number stored in its memory.”

  “What number?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “Don’t use it unless you absolutely have to,” he says. “There are things happening outside that I don’t want to jeopardize, but I won’t leave you on your own with no way of calling for help. I can’t.”

  “Nate…”

  “I have to go,” he says, and suddenly his hands are holding my face. Under normal circumstances this would either freeze me as solid as a statue or reduce me to a dribble of putty, but these aren’t normal circumstances. I’m shaking with rising panic and my mind is flooded with questions and a single, desperate thought is pounding the inside of my head.

  Please don’t leave me. Not you too. Please.

  “I know you have doubts,” he whispers. “You hide them well, but I know they’re there. Listen to them, Moonbeam. Put your Faith in yourself, in your own eyes and your own mind. Don’t trust anyone.”

  “Nate…”

  He hauls me into a tight hug. “It’s going to be okay,” he says. “I promise.”

  My head rests against his chest, my body stiff, my arms hanging uselessly at my sides. There are a million things I want to say to him, but in this moment, in this nightmare I know there’s no waking up from, I can only think of a single one.

  “Don’t go,” I whisper.

  He squeezes me tightly, and his lips brush my forehead. Then his arms unwrap from around me and my head is suddenly resting against nothing. I hear the faint creak of my door opening and closing, the metallic click of the padlock being fixed into place, and I’m in the dark again.

  Alone.

  “Was he gone in the morning?” asks Agent Carlyle.

  I nod. “He was,” I say. “The Centurions woke us up at dawn and told us all to gather in the yard. By the time we got there, Father John was already waiting on the Chapel steps. He looked furious.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He told us Nate was an Outsider spy,” I say. “That he had been working against the Legion since the day he arrived. He told us we were all idiots, that we had smiled and laughed and joked with a Servant Of The Serpent who had been planning to murder us all in our beds while we slept. He said that he had seen through Nate immediately and had been waiting for us to do the same, waiting for just a single one of us to have the brains and the Faith to see the truth, but that he had been forced to take action himself because we were all too blind and weak and stupid. He told us we had failed the Legion, had failed The Lord Himself, and that he was disgusted and disappointed with every single one of us.”

  RIGHTLY SO! I TOLD NOTHI—

  I push Father John’s voice away, hard, and it falls silent. Some distant part of me marvels at how much easier it has become to shut him up.

  “Did you believe him?” asks Doctor Hernandez.

  “I’m not sure,” I say. “He clearly suspected something when Nate refused to be a Centurion, but whether or not he really had doubts about him before then, I don’t know. Why would he have chosen Nate to be a Centurion if he didn’t think he was True?”

  “It might have been a test,” says Doctor Hernandez. “A way to find out for sure about Nate, one way or the other.”

  “I guess,” I say. “It made him look really bad though, Nate refusing his order in front of everyone. I don’t know if that would have been worth finding out whether he was loyal or not.”

  “So what do you think was the truth?” asks Agent Carlyle. “Why do you think Nate did what he did?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know,” I say. “I thought about it a lot, in the days after he disappeared, and for a while I thought it was just the idea of being a Centurion that spooked him, that he didn’t want the responsibility. But I thought about what he said to me in my room on the night he left, about things happening outside that he didn’t want to jeopardize, and I thought about the cell phone and the key, and I ended up thinking that maybe Father John was right. He pretty much had to make Nate sound as bad and False and dangerous as possible once he was Gone, and even though I don’t believe Nate meant to hurt anyone, not for a second, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a spy. But if he was, I don’t know why he didn’t just say yes to being a Centurion. It would have got him as close to Father John as anybody.”

  “Maybe he thought that closeness would mean a higher chance of being dis
covered,” says Agent Carlyle. “Or maybe he couldn’t face what he would have had to do if he said yes. Punishing people, hurting them, locking them in boxes. Maybe that was too much for him.”

  “I don’t suppose you know who he really was?” I ask.

  He smiles at me, and shakes his head. “I don’t know anything about Nate Childress,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  “Would you tell me if you did?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.

  “No,” he says. “Not if I wasn’t allowed to.”

  “I guess that’s honest, at least,” I say. “Does that mean I shouldn’t believe you don’t know anything about my mother?”

  Agent Carlyle’s smile falters. “That’s not what I—”

  “It’s fine,” I say. “Forget it.”

  Doctor Hernandez glances back and forth between us, a frown of concern on his face. Agent Carlyle looks at me for a long moment, then nods. I don’t know what his gesture is supposed to mean. That I’m right not to believe anything they say? Or that I’m wrong, and he’s telling me that I can trust him?

  “So there was no sign of Nate?” asks Agent Carlyle. “The next morning, I mean?”

  I shake my head. “They found a pair of bolt cutters by the south-west corner of the fence,” I say. “There was a hole in the wire, and he was Gone. Amos went out looking for him in the pickup, in case he was hitchhiking down the highway, but nobody was really surprised when he got home and told us he hadn’t seen anything. I guess it’s pretty easy to disappear in the desert.”

  Agent Carlyle nods. “It is.”

  “So that was that,” I say. “The whole Legion got called into the Chapel and Father John screamed at us for hours, telling us we had lost sight of the True Path, that our Faith was bullshit, that we were weak and stupid and that none of us deserved to Ascend. Lots of people were in tears by the time he was done.”

  “But not you.”

  I smile. “No,” I say. “I thought about what Nate told me, about what my mom said when they Banished her, and I watched Father John scream and rant and froth at the mouth and I saw him for what he was. What he always was.”

  “And what was that?” asks Doctor Hernandez.

  “A man,” I say. “A little cleverer than most maybe, and blessed with a way with words. Not The Lord Himself, not even his messenger. Just a man, as vain and greedy and angry as any other.”

  He smiles at me. “I’ve never heard you talk about him like that before.”

  “It’s hard,” I say. “It feels wrong, even now. For a long time I was sure that even thinking a bad thought about him would see me spend eternity in Hell.”

  “But you don’t believe that any more?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t believe that any more.”

  There you go, says the voice in the back of my head. Well done. Tell the truth, and shame the Devil.

  The truth.

  It felt weird to say all that about Father John out loud, but that’s what it is.

  The truth.

  And just like that, I feel lighter. It’s like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders, like at least some of Father John’s poison has been drawn out of my soul, making me feel better than I have in as long as I can remember.

  “Did you stop believing when Nate left?” asks Doctor Hernandez.

  I shake my head. “That was the final straw,” I say. “But it goes back a lot further than that.”

  “To what happened to your mother?” he asks. “I’m sorry, I know you don’t like to—”

  “It’s fine,” I say. “I wasn’t allowed to talk about her for a long time. I wasn’t supposed to even think about her. So right now, it’s okay. And yeah, what happened to her was part of it. A big part. Although everything is sort of messed up with everything else, because it wasn’t Father John I lost Faith in when my mom was Banished, not right away. I know it must sound bad, but I lost Faith in her. It made me understand that I could never just automatically trust what any person said or did, no matter who they are or how much they mean to you. It made me realize that everyone is capable of being deceitful, even to the people they claim to love. It made me see that everyone lies.”

  “That’s a hard lesson,” says Agent Carlyle. “Finding out that your parents aren’t perfect, that they’re just as flawed as anyone else.”

  “Agreed,” says Doctor Hernandez. “That’s never easy.”

  I nod.

  “Most people don’t learn it the same way you did, in all fairness,” says Agent Carlyle. “Normally it’s their mom getting a DUI or their dad having an affair with his secretary.”

  I frown. “An affair is when you have sex with someone that isn’t the person you’re supposed to have sex with?”

  Agent Carlyle colours pale pink, and I realize he’s not comfortable talking about this with me.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

  “It’s fine,” he says.

  “It’s absolutely fine,” says Doctor Hernandez. “Although I don’t think it’s necessarily an appropriate topic for discussion at this point.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” says Agent Carlyle. “It’s a valid question, and she needs to start understanding the real world. Otherwise how is she going to cope when she gets out of here?”

  “There’s a process—”

  Agent Carlyle and I groan in perfect unison. For the briefest of milliseconds, Doctor Hernandez looks absolutely furious, but the moment quickly passes and he breaks into a smile.

  “Fine,” he says. “Go ahead and answer her question. Just be careful.”

  Stop talking about me like I’m not sitting here. I thought we were past that.

  “I’m not a doll,” I say. “I’m not going to break.”

  “Okay,” says Agent Carlyle. “So having sex with someone other than a person you’ve committed to is called infidelity, although most people call it cheating. An affair is different. It’s still cheating, but it’s when someone has an ongoing relationship with someone who isn’t the person they committed to, and keeps it a secret.”

  “Is it worse?” I ask.

  “Most people tend to think so,” he says. “Plenty of people have forgiven their partner for having sex with someone else, but I don’t know anyone who has forgiven an affair.”

  “Have you ever had one?”

  Agent Carlyle’s eyes widen and the colour in his cheeks darkens from pale pink to crimson. “That definitely takes us into inappropriate territory.”

  “Does it?” asks Doctor Hernandez, a mischievous grin on his face. “Oh good. Thanks for letting us know where the line is. I’m sure Moonbeam and I are very grateful.”

  Agent Carlyle shakes his head, but there’s a big smile on his face. “Let’s just get back on track, shall we?”

  I meet their smiles with one of my own. “Sure.”

  “The day after Nate Childress left,” he says, “what happened after you were all lectured in the chapel?”

  “Everyone went to work,” I say. “Father John ordered double time, and we got put on punishment rations for a week.”

  “What did that mean?”

  “Two slices of bread.”

  “For each meal?”

  I shake my head. “Each day.”

  “Each day?”

  I nod.

  He stares at me with narrowed eyes, like he’s trying to work out whether I’m being serious. “Did Father John eat the same as the rest of you?”

  What do you think? After everything I’ve told you about him, do you really still need to ask?

  “Punishment rations didn’t apply to him,” I say. “Or to the Centurions.”

  “What about his wives?”

  I nod.

  “The children? His children?”

  I nod again. Agent Carlyle takes a deep breath.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m not trying to upset you. I’m just answering your questions.”

  He shakes his head. “It’s not you, Moon
beam,” he says. “I just can’t…I mean, I just…Jesus. Okay. What did you do with the things Nate gave you?”

  “I hid them.”

  “Where?”

  “There was a loose floorboard under my bed,” I say. “I put the phone and the key underneath it.”

  “Did anyone ever find them?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever use them?”

  Careful, whispers the voice in the back of my head.

  “I used them both once,” I say.

  “Do you want to tell us about that?” asks Doctor Hernandez.

  I shake my head. “Not right now,” I say. “If that’s okay?”

  “That’s fine,” he says. “It feels like everyone could use some time to process the events of the last couple of days, so we’ve cancelled this afternoon’s SSI session. Enjoy your lunch and get some rest.”

  “I don’t sleep very well at night,” I say. “Maybe I’ll have better luck in the afternoon.”

  Doctor Hernandez smiles. “Fingers crossed.”

  Nurse Harrow gives me her usual smile before she pulls my door shut and locks it.

  A shaft of late morning sunlight is blazing through my room’s window. The sun is too high and the window is too small for it to reach all the way down to the floor, but if I stand on my tiptoes next to the door I can angle my face up into the warm beam. I stand like that for a while, until the light moves out of my reach. I suppose I could stand on my chair, but that seems a little bit crazy.

  Instead, I sit down at the desk, slide a sheet of paper off the pile, and pick up a thick blue crayon.

  The Second Proclamation of the Holy Church of the Lord’s Legion, Faithfully Transcribed by the Lord’s Most Humble Messenger, Father John Parson

  For it shall come to pass, when the End Times are upon us and The Lord Calls His Faithful Home, a Battle such as the human realm has never known. The Servants Of The Serpent shall reveal themselves, and those men and women of Faith who walk the True Path shall be Called to serve the Glory of The Lord.