by Will Hill
Blood gushes out between his fingers, soaking his shirt crimson. Smoke curls from the barrel of the gun in my hand. He stares at me and I watch as the light fades from his eyes. Then he topples backward and crashes onto the floorboards, his limbs splayed and limp.
My fingers open involuntarily and the gun drops to the floor. My chest is locked tight and my lungs are starting to scream but all I can do is stare at the crumpled figure in front of me. Blood is spreading across the floor beneath him and he’s lying completely still and I don’t need to check his pulse because I know he’s dead.
He’s dead.
Because I shot him.
I killed him.
I drag a gasping breath down my throat as my stomach churns, doubling me over. I squeeze my eyes shut, because maybe when I open them there’ll be no blood and nobody will be dead and I’ll be lying in the darkness of my room in Building Nine and this will all just have been a nightmare. But when I look again, nothing has changed. The smell of blood still fills my nostrils and the pistol is still lying next to my feet and Father John is still dead.
The voice in the back of my head appears, hard and full of urgency. It tells me to snap out of it, that there’s nothing I can do here except die with everyone else, but even though I know it’s right I can’t make my body move. I’m frozen to the spot, overwhelmed by the horror all around me.
By what I did.
Move! screams the voice. You have to move! While there’s still time!
I manage to turn my head, and my eyes settle on the door beneath the stairs, the one that Father John emerged from. I feel the angular weight of the skeleton key in my pocket, and I hear Nate’s voice telling me that there’s more in the basement room than guns, a lot more.
I take an unsteady step towards the door, and another, and another, and then I’m holding the wooden frame and I’m looking down the stairs that Father John walked up – before you shot him – barely a minute earlier. The lights are on and I can see the basement landing and I start down the stairs, gripping the bannister tightly as I go because I’m not remotely confident that my legs are going to hold me up.
I stumble off the last step and stagger until I regain my balance, but I make it to the bottom in one piece. The metal door that Nate talked to me about stands in front of me, its surface gleaming dully. I take the skeleton key out of my pocket, slide it into the heavy lock, and twist it to the left. It turns easily, the mechanism smooth and silent, and the door separates from its frame with a heavy thunk. I push it open, and walk into one of the few rooms in the entire Base that I’ve never been in before.
Lights flicker into life above my head and my heart leaps into my mouth, but the strip bulbs are blinding fluorescent white and I scan every brightly lit corner of the room and there’s nobody there. The panic that leaped through me recedes, and I take a long, slow look around.
Two whole walls hold metal racks that reach almost to the ceiling. And even though dozens and dozens are being fired by my Brothers and Sisters at this very moment, the racks are still full of guns.
So many guns.
Shotguns and rifles and pistols, their barrels gleaming with oil, sit above shelves groaning with boxes of every type of ammunition, and as I try to take it all in my first thought is to wonder where they came from. Surely Amos didn’t pick them all up on his Friday trips into Town?
But then I think about how long The Lord’s Legion has existed, how many times the red pickup truck has gone back and forth to Layfield, and how long Father John has been preaching the End Times. I think about it all and I stare at the racks of guns and I suddenly understand something that Nate tried to tell me when we were walking next to the eastern fence – how carefully Father John has been planning for what is taking place outside right now.
How much he wanted the Final Battle to come.
Even though he knew people would die. But that didn’t matter, because he never intended to actually fight himself.
Anger flickers into my chest, but I don’t push it away. I welcome it. It clears my head, and fills my reeling body with strength. I let it settle into me, and take a look around the rest of the room.
On a big table in the middle, a number of dismantled rifles lie in pieces next to plastic boxes full of screws and discarded UPS cartons. Standing on its own in the centre of the wall opposite is a grey filing cabinet.
I walk across to it, still clutching the skeleton key in my hand, but it’s immediately clear that I’m not going to need it, because the top drawer is open. I slide it out fully and peer inside.
Hanging on plastic rails are a bunch of cardboard files. They have no labels, but when I lift out the first one the anger that was bubbling in my gut is replaced by cold, familiar unease, because the file is full of driving licences.
Dozens and dozens of them.
I pick up a handful and see faces I recognize beside names I’ve never heard before. The first one has a photo of Horizon that must be at least twenty years old – the thick beard is still there, but the lines around his eyes are nowhere to be seen – and lists his name as Michael Brantley, of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The second looks like someone I vaguely remember from when I was little, maybe one of the people who left in the aftermath of The Purge, and the third is someone I don’t recognize at all, which is weird.
The fourth makes me gasp out loud.
Bella might be lying dead on the ground outside for all I know, but in the photo I’m staring at she looks barely older than me. Her long blonde hair is parted in the middle and she’s smiling into the camera and the faded type on the plastic card tells me her name is Megan Joiner, and that she lives in Burlington, Vermont.
I flick through the rest of the licences. The men and women my Brothers and Sisters used to be smile out at me, their faces frozen in time, as ice creeps under every inch of my skin and settles there. I put the cards back into the folder and pull out the next one. It’s full of letters and certificates I don’t have time to read, but I recognize some of the names at the tops of the pages.
Chase Manhattan. CitiBank. Wells Fargo.
I slide the drawer shut and open the next one down. There’s only a single folder inside this one and I feel a lump climb into my throat as I lift it out. It contains a thick sheaf of documents, held together by an elastic band, but I can see the words on the first page and I know what they mean.
Last Will and Testament.
I put the documents down on the top of the filing cabinet, pull off the elastic band, and read the first page’s single short paragraph.
I, Amos Nathaniel Andrews, being of sound mind and body, do hereby give notification that, upon the event of my death, I leave all my worldly possessions to John Parson, of Layton County, Texas, or to his descendants. I do this of my own free will, under the watchful gaze of The Lord.
The second document is almost identical, with only the name changed.
As is the next one.
And the next. And the next.
I leaf through the rest of the bundle, maybe fifty or sixty pages, and find the same thing on every single one: men and women freely and willingly leaving everything they own to John Parson.
To Father John.
Freely and willingly, whispers the voice in the back of my head. Right.
Another part of what Nate told me that afternoon on the edge of The Base suddenly makes sense. He made it clear that the fence couldn’t keep our enemies out, but he claimed it was capable of keeping people in, and I didn’t understand what he was saying until now. It isn’t the fence that keeps people in, and it never has been – people stay unless Father John wants them to go, because he has made sure they can’t leave.
I guess Outsiders can get a new driving licence if they need one, because people must lose them all the time. But how do you build a new life when someone has taken over all your bank accounts and savings accounts and has a signed document saying that everything you own will one day belong to him? Drive through the Front Gate as fast as you can
and go to the police? Hire a lawyer? Put your Faith in the Government and ask for their help?
Maybe.
But what if Father John was right all along? What if you go to the police and end up strapped to a table in a basement with gasoline being poured down your throat? Are you sure that won’t happen? Are you so sure that you’ll take the risk?
Paranoia. Fear. Behind it all, time and again, at the root of everything.
Fear, and control.
I close the folder, my skin crawling at the feel of the pages, and open the third and final drawer. This one has no folders in it at all; instead it is piled high with dozens of objects that I don’t recognize but that I instinctively understand.
Wallets and bunches of keys. Photos of smiling men and women. Silver cigarette lighters and necklaces of multi-coloured beads. Gold and silver rings. Toy cars and cards with baseball players on them. Notebooks made of leather and paper. At least twenty cell phones.
Things that my Brothers and Sisters once held dear, that mattered to them in ways they probably couldn’t have fully explained, taken away and put in a filing cabinet behind a locked door.
Mementos of the people they used to be.
Keepsakes of lost lives.
Tears creep into the corners of my eyes because I’m thinking about my dad’s knives and the page from his diary and the photo of my grandparents, and I’m trying to imagine how it would feel to give them up, to hand them over to somebody knowing I’d never see them again, and I just can’t. Then I see a white envelope at the back of the drawer and I pick it up and turn it over and everything inside me lurches and I’m suddenly sure I’m going to faint.
There’s a single word on the envelope. Eight letters, scrawled in handwriting I would recognize anywhere.
It’s my mom’s handwriting.
And written on the envelope is Moonbeam.
I don’t know how long I stare at it. It’s probably only a second or two, but my head is swimming and my breath is stopped in my lungs and it feels like hours, like days and weeks and months, like eons of time are wheeling past in the blink of an eye. The gunfire rattles endlessly outside, but I don’t hear it. The roar of spreading fire crackles and spits, but I don’t hear it either. The room is starting to get hot, but I don’t feel it.
I don’t hear anything and I don’t feel anything because I’m no longer here.
I’m somewhere else.
I’m standing on a bright green clifftop and I’m looking out over water that is so blue it hurts my eyes. I don’t turn around, but I know there’s a house behind me, a house with cornflower-blue walls and a white picket fence and smoke curling up out of its chimney and I know the footsteps I can hear belong to my mom and I know she’s smiling as she walks towards me and any second now she’s going to put her hands on my shoulders and tell me it’s time to come inside because dinner is—
A deafening screech fills the basement, shocking me out of the place my mind has retreated to. I clap my hands over my ears because the sound is awful, so loud and so harsh that I don’t think I can stand it, and I stagger across the room towards the open metal door.
Barely a second later most of the ceiling collapses, smashing the table to pieces and burying the floor beneath a smouldering heap of charred wood and broken glass. There are chairs and floorboards and bits of what looks like a bed frame in the pile of wreckage, and I can see swirling smoke and a blue sliver of sky above me and as I cough and gag on a billowing cloud of dust and ash I understand what just happened.
The roof has fallen in.
The voice in the back of my head appears, urgent and insistent. You have to go, it says. You have to go right now.
I turn back towards the door, ready to do as I’m told, when panic suddenly grips me. I look down in what feels like slow motion, but the letter with my name on it is still in my hand, and I manage to take something close to a normal breath as I stagger out through the door and peer up the stairs. I can’t see any damage, although I guess that doesn’t really mean anything – if the whole roof has come down, the door at the top could easily be blocked, which would leave clambering up through the hole in the ceiling as the only way out of the basement.
A quick glance over my shoulder is enough to confirm that the room is already on fire in half a dozen places. I stare at it for a moment, but then I remember the boxes of ammunition that are now buried by burning beams and rugs and splinters of plasterboard, and I turn and run up the stairs as fast as I’m able, coughing and spluttering, tripping and stumbling over every other step. I reach the top and turn the door handle and push it with all my strength.
The door swings open and I stagger back into the living room. The entire house is creaking and screeching and there’s an ominous bulge in the centre of the ceiling, but it seems to be holding, for now at least.
I stuff the envelope into my pocket and head for the front door, past the bodies of Father John and the Centurions, past pools of blood that have merged into a gleaming crimson lake. The smoke-filled air catches in my throat and burns my eyes as I cross the smouldering porch and clatter down the wooden steps and run as fast as my legs will carry me towards the west barracks.
For a long time, Agent Carlyle just stares at me.
“That’s the truth,” I say, my voice barely more than a whisper. “That’s all of it.”
He keeps staring. His face is pale, his expression unreadable.
“Say something,” I say. “Please?”
He stands up and walks forward. Part of me breathes a sigh of relief when he leans across the bed, because this is surely the moment I always knew was coming, when the handcuffs snap around my wrists and he tells me I’m under arrest for murder – but that’s not what happens. Instead, he takes hold of my shoulders and pulls me gently away from the wall and wraps his arms around me.
I start to cry, great sobs that fill my throat and rack my chest, and he holds me close and tells me it’s okay, and I want to tell him I’m not crying because I’m sad, I’m not even crying at the memory of what I did, but I can’t form the words.
I’m crying because the last locked door inside myself is open. I’m crying because I had forgotten what it felt like to not have a heart full of secrets, to not be scared all the time. I’m crying because I don’t know what happens next and that’s okay, that’s really okay. Not knowing feels like being free.
“So many people dead,” he says. His voice is low, his mouth close to my ear. “So many lives destroyed, and for what? So one little man could be king of a patch of desert full of men and women who just desperately wanted to believe in something.”
He lets go of me and steps back. I shuffle to the edge of the bed and we look at each other and I don’t have any idea what I’m supposed to do now.
I have nothing else to tell them. Nothing left to say.
I’m empty.
Agent Carlyle leans against my desk. “The rest of what you told us was the truth?” he asks. “It happened like you said?” he asks.
I nod. “I went to the west barracks,” I say. “I burned my hand on the padlock and one of the agents used my key to let the kids out.”
“Honey?”
I shake my head. “She wasn’t there. Rainbow led the others across the yard and the last thing I remember is Luke being carried towards the Front Gate.”
“She said she looked for you,” says Agent Carlyle. “Honey, I mean. She only went to the gate after she saw the roof of the Big House fall in.”
“She should have gone straight away,” I say. “But she made it out in one piece. That’s all that matters, I guess.”
He nods. “And you saw Amos Andrews?”
I nod. “I saw him,” I say. “I think he shot at me, but I’m not sure.”
“Why do you think he wasn’t summoned to the Big House with the Centurions? He was John Parson’s oldest companion.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess that didn’t mean very much to him at the end.”
“I guess
not,” he says.
Ask him, says the voice in the back of my head. Just ask him. It’s okay.
I take a deep breath. “Am I in trouble?” I ask. “For what I did?”
He frowns. “What you did to John Parson?”
I nod.
He shakes his head. “Absolutely not,” he says. “I told you before that what you did would be the easiest case of self-defence any attorney ever put forward. But it’s not going to come to that. The criminal investigation is now focused entirely on John Parson and the other senior members of The Lord’s Legion. No others charges are being brought.”
“They don’t know what I did,” I say. “Your colleagues, I mean. They might think differently if they did.”
“I don’t think they would,” he says. “My understanding is that the investigation will conclude that one of the Centurions shot him before they killed themselves. I can tell them the truth though, if you really want me to?”
“Tell them,” I say instantly. “I don’t want any more secrets. I don’t want to have to carry anything with me when I leave here.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“You understand I can’t guarantee how my colleagues will react to this?” he says. “It would probably be safer for me to tell them you found Parsons dead when you entered the Big House.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” I say. “I’m sure that would be safer. But I want you to tell them the truth. I’m tired of lies.”
He nods. “All right,” he says. “I’ll tell them what happened. I should warn you that it might take a while for them to assess everything and reach a conclusion.”
“I think I can handle that.”
He smiles at me. “I don’t think there’s much you can’t handle, Moonbeam.”
I wish I was as sure about that as you are.
“Thank you,” I say.
He nods, and his eyes move to the wall behind me. It looks like he’s thinking something over, so I sit quietly and let him get wherever he’s going. After a silent minute or two, he stands up and pulls a small orange folder out of the inside pocket of his jacket.