Giulia said in the same nonchalant voice as Cheryl, “Like someone clubbed me over the head with one of these skillets.”
“It does hit you like that the first few times. Your body will acclimate soon.” She lifted the corner of an egg.
Giulia found a flat dish and transferred the bacon. No paper towels to drain it. Oh, well. She worded her next question with care. “The smoke from the incense was so pleasant and relaxing. I smelled pine, but are we allowed to know what else is in it?”
Cheryl transferred the eggs onto another plate. “Oh, sure. Last night’s mix was patchouli, pine, cedar, and juniper oils. We tinker with it to match the seasons.”
Giulia breathed a little easier. One worry off her neck. Now she had to find an opening to ask about Antlered Alex.
“Shouldn’t we toast the bread? Ariel said it had crossed over to stale.”
“No time, now that the eggs are done. Cold fried eggs are an offense to our hard-working chickens. I’ll cut the bread. You’ve got jam and butter, I see. The starving masses will never notice bread versus toast the morning after a ritual.”
Chanting male voices interrupted them.
“O nymphs of the breakfast table,
Bring us bacon to buoy our souls.
Bacon. Bacon. Bacon. Bacon.”
Giulia laughed. Four faces squeezed against the screen door, all attempting Bambi Eyes. Cheryl took the bacon dish and waved it at them. Their tongues came out as one and panted.
“Go pour us some coffee, desperate creatures, and we will solace your palates with the food of the gods.” Cheryl turned away with the bacon and the men scattered. “We’d better get out there before I eat these eggs myself.”
Four more community members brought plates of eggs, bacon, and bread from their own houses to the tables. Mugs of hot colored water pretending to be coffee sat at every place.
Why Giulia Driscoll would never make it as a Doomsday Prepper, reason number six, superseding all other reasons: COFFEE.
She almost wished they’d given her a choice of whatever kind of herbal tea these people grew, but after last night not even the threat of death would make her touch any herbs they offered her.
Alex arrived—fully clothed, hooray—and downed a huge glass of goat’s milk in one long swallow.
“Good morning,” he said. “I see bacon in my future.”
“Good morning, Alex,” a ragged chorus answered.
Tim and Jim passed him the bacon and eggs. Cheryl had been spot-on about the morning after a ritual. Unlike the multiple dinner conversations last night, no one spoke this morning until all the plates had been emptied.
What fascinated Giulia almost as much as the whole “the god inhabits Alex” conversation was the completely normal way Alex’s flock treated him after last night.
Olivier had nailed it, but she couldn’t wait to tell him about this collective mental shut-off valve.
The cheesemaker and the goat milker stood first.
“I’m off to the cheese shed.”
“I’m with the bees.”
“Spinning for me,” Cheryl said.
“Fletching arrows,” the outdoorsman’s wife said.
“We’re working on the water purifiers,” Tim and Jim said.
“We’ll do the dishes,” the accordion player and his wife said.
“Repairing the archery and shooting targets,” the outdoorsman said.
Now that she knew what to look for, Giulia saw both their tattoos peeping out from their shirt collars.
“I’ll kidnap Maria to mix feed for the animals,” Alex said.
Giulia repressed a shudder. Not that word, Antler Boy. Not that word.
Forty-Two
Giulia kept a step behind Alex as they tramped to yet another shed, which led to yet another question: How had she not seen all these sheds before? Answer: Because all the sheds were hidden among the trees and had been painted in woodsy camouflage. She wondered which paint company had grabbed the opportunity to siphon money from Doomsday Preppers. Smart marketing.
The sheds followed an erratic pattern along the path from the circle of houses to the acres of crops. Even so, they could only be accessed by climbing over rocks or around bushes and trees. Sometimes this community didn’t possess the brains of a bag of hammers. Those minor obstacles had the strength of a wet piece of toilet paper against an anticipated zombie apocalypse.
But logic wouldn’t get in the way of paranoia here in Antlered Alex’s domain where he led and his sheep followed. She tried to remember if he’d kept a step ahead of her on her first visit to his single-serving size farm.
It wouldn’t come. Guys who took leadership for granted weren’t on her red flag list for dating site connections. He hadn’t come across as uber-patriarchal either.
Alex opened the third shed in the irregular row. Old-fashioned galvanized trash cans fitted with locking lids lined two of the three shed walls. A deep shelf holding buckets and scoops stretched the length of the back wall.
“We’ll make four mixes,” he said, opening the trash can nearest him on the left. “For the chickens we want oats, wheat, corn, and peas. The peas are in the corner by you. One cup of them to start.”
Giulia added the peas to one of the buckets and Alex poured wheat on top of them. They topped it off with oats and corn and she mixed it with her hands. As they started the goats’ bucket she said, “What happened around the fire last night?”
He poured sunflower seeds in the bottom of the new bucket and Giulia added barley. She glanced up at him when he didn’t answer right away. He appeared to be communing within himself. Giulia created a mental Cult Bingo card:
True Believer
God Speaks
to Me
God Speaks
through Me
The Old Ways
Family
Unity
Sex Magick
is Power
Procreation = Survival
The World As We Know It
Her Convent Cult Bingo card wouldn’t have had the sex parts. Every nun in training learned about the evils of the Particular Friendship early on.
Alex didn’t speak until Giulia mixed the goat food and scooped corn for the sheep. “What did you think of it?”
Weasel. If he only knew what an accomplished liar she’d become from all her undercover work. Maria Martin decided not to play it too dumb. “I was startled, even after smoking with everyone. At first I didn’t know who or what appeared in the smoke. When you came nearer I recognized you in your guise.”
His benevolent face appeared again. She was really beginning to hate that face.
“You are perceptive. Cheryl was also raised as a Catholic and she was the only one to recognize me when the god possessed me. I wonder what qualities Catholics absorb to make them see beneath the veil.” He added wilted dandelion greens to the pigs’ bucket. “Perhaps it is the ingrained Catholic dogma of believing in what one cannot see. Corn cobs for the pigs, please. They’re in the can behind you.”
Giulia used her hands to load pieces of corn cob into a bigger bucket.
“Doomsday Preppers can fall off the edge of reason into a morass of useless paranoia.” Alex mixed the corn cobs with the greens. “When I realized the world as we know it was headed full-tilt into destruction, I knew I had to create a community that would survive it. A little more wheat for the sheep, please.”
One catchphrase uttered. Giulia had done her time at countless Sunday afternoon church Bingo sessions. Her mental Bingo dauber smooshed a big red circle over the first square.
“I bough
t this property years ago because I chose to live off grid when I wasn’t at my day job. No one came here unless I invited them, so I used my annual vacation to meditate on what I needed to do.” He studied the four buckets. “This is enough.”
He picked up the two larger buckets. Giulia followed, again, with the two remaining ones. Alex latched the shed door.
“You understand the need for faith in something greater than ourselves. At the time, I had no such faith. I closed up my house and took a sleeping bag, a fishing pole, and a week’s worth of mead out to the creek. This was August two years ago. After three days of silence and meditation, I learned two essential elements of life without creature comforts: The first was to find a recipe for natural mosquito repellent.”
They reached the chicken enclosure and he let them out, grinning.
“You should have seen me. They targeted every square inch of my exposed skin. I see they’re targeting you as well. We must have similar blood.”
Ick. Giulia scattered feed in the sparse grass. The poultry dived on it. “I wouldn’t want those beaks coming after me.”
“They’re not aggressive. On the other hand, it’s a good thing your first milking went so well. Some of our family got hooved in the chest and arms their first time.”
Family. Another Bingo square filled. They moved on to the pigs. Bacon on the hoof liked its food too.
“It would be evil of me to start an internet meme claiming bacon is vegan,” she said.
Alex gave her a puzzled look.
“The pigs snarfed down those dandelion greens like they were Godiva chocolates. Pigs eat greens; greens are vegan; therefore, bacon is vegan. Aristotle.”
Alex laughed. He had a good laugh. Giulia wondered how many of the community he lured in with it.
“The god never steers me wrong. You’re one more proof of his wisdom.”
As they headed for the goats, Giulia said, “You’re not talking about the Judeo-Christian God, are you?”
“Not for a minute. Pour the feed into the troths before we let them out. The goats are aggressive when they’re hungry.” After the horned beasts attacked their breakfast instead of their humans, Alex said, “I knew of the gods of the major world religions in vogue today, and I wasn’t impressed by the track records of their followers. When I went to the creek to cleanse myself inside and out, I wasn’t sure what precisely I was preparing myself for.”
Giulia remembered her six weeks of total silence retreat before taking final vows. Nothing special had happened to her then, except wanting a simple conversation about nothing in particular so bad she sneaked into the woods and began talking to the squirrels, like a demented Saint Francis.
“When the moon rose on the fourth night, I was empty and exhausted. A hollow vessel. As though he had been waiting for that precise moment, Cernunnos, the ancient god of the hunt, spoke to me.”
Bingo square number three. If Alex kept this pace, she’d fill the card before he dragged her out to the archery range again.
“I see.” Ray Liotta’s ghostly voice from Field of Dreams popped into her head: “If you starve yourself, he will come.” Not an exact quote, but the same principle if one was cynical enough to equate a dead baseball player giving orders to a guilt-ridden baseball fanatic with Alex’s convoluted mentality and drug proclivities.
Giulia’s tone of voice must not have met expectations, because Wild-Eyed Alex turned on her. “I am not speaking figuratively.”
“I realize—”
“Nor am I being facetious. You should know something of the vision of the great mystics of Catholicism. Such privileged communication is the hallmark of the true believer.”
Four squares down, five to go.
She bit the corner of her bottom lip in a gesture of repentance and coquettishness.“I wasn’t making fun of you, honest I wasn’t. I’m trying to process a lot of stuff right now.” Wild-Eyed Alex might respond to either, thus she hedged her bet.
The thundering preacher light faded from his eyes. He shifted his empty bucket to his left hand and chucked her chin with his right. A leader who treated her like an empty-headed piece of fluff and who wanted to get into her pants. Ugh. What kind of women populated this community? Who thought paternalism with a touch of misogyny was sexy? At least when she became the Bride of Christ, God didn’t use her for sex. She and Father Carlos were going to need a lot of extra time for her next confession.
“You’re learning.” Alex continued, “When I first heard the god’s voice, I thought I’d been alone in the woods too long. After a few more words, the god convinced me of his reality. He told me he had seen my emptiness from my birth. My mother miscarried a twin in the womb. I had never told anyone about it, but Cernunnos knew. At that moment I realized the god wasn’t all in my head.”
Vindication for Giulia’s twin theory. This case was too much like a roller coaster ride for her first-trimester nausea meter. She also wanted to wash her brain in Lysol the more Alex bared his rancid soul to her. Did his god tell him to take all those Polaroids, or were they Alex’s offering to it?
The Hedge of Separation needed a sign above the ivy curtain: Abandon All Brains, Ye Who Enter Here.
“After I bowed before Cernunnos, he informed me withdrawing from this corrupt world wasn’t enough. We must return to the old ways if we wished to survive.”
Four squares left now. Joanne had swallowed this. She must be the empty-headed twin. No, she was the needy twin. The one who projected “beige” inside and out. But her neediness didn’t extend to swallowing the Kool-Aid forever, since she escaped.
If she escaped.
What Giulia needed was a cadaver dog. No. First she needed to end this sleepover. Next, she needed to call Diane to ask if the police had searched for Joanne’s body. Since Diane had been adamant about Joanne being alive, Giulia was pretty certain the police hadn’t. Third, then: A cadaver dog.
Alex hadn’t stopped talking. Oops. Now how would she fill her Bingo card?
“We have to get to the dandelions before the sheep do. The pigs need them more and there’s plenty of grass for the sheep to supplement the grain mix we feed them.”
Whew. Apparently Alex had held off on his revelations from beyond to instruct Giulia on the care and maintenance of the walking lamb chops. He handed Giulia the last empty bucket.
“Some would refer to my experience as a vision, but that is incorrect. Cernunnos did not appear to my physical eyes, nor did his voice sound in the ears of my flesh.”
Giulia’s face never broke character as she thought Alex had missed his best opportunity to use his camera. A photograph of an ancient god would’ve raked it in on eBay.
“By opening myself to all possibilities, I allowed Cernunnos to inhabit me. He inhabits me still. We are a twinned being, my flesh and his spirit. He has made me whole again as I should have been from before my birth. He speaks through me in the rituals when the sex magick allows his power to flow through my seed into that night’s chosen vessel, as it was in the old days between himself and the moon goddess.”
One, two, three squares filled all at once. Giulia nodded. She didn’t trust her mouth not to reply as herself instead of Maria Martin.
Alex led her back to the feed shed without checking to see if she wanted to go somewhere else first, what a surprise.
“So you see, our community is united as one through faith, action, and procreation. The god’s seed will create a new generation of believers to carry us into a new world. It won’t be a paradise, because so much of the earth is poisoned, but we are the beginning. Future generations will look back on our preparations and take our values throughout the world.”
What would Maria Martin say? Giulia’s mouth opened and Maria came out: “I’m a little overwhelmed.” She made Precious Moments eyes up at Alex. “But I’m also thrilled you’re considering me f
or inclusion in your community. I’m not afraid of hard work, and I’m sure I can overcome my addiction to Primanti Brothers’ giant sandwiches.”
Alex got all paternal on her again. Giulia thanked her friends who kept raving about those sandwiches. She’d have to try one.
As Alex stroked Maria Martin’s coquettish ego, Giulia Driscoll pictured the breaking news story on the local stations of all four major networks: “Doomsday Drug Dealers Arrested.” Tim and Jim’s faces would be pixilated out as the police raided the compound. A stone-faced cop would carry out from Alex’s house a box of the photos with the god antlers and wig balanced on top. She and Frank would toast the arrest with ginger ale, because of little Zlatan.
Olivier would make serious bank out of these people when their lawyers demanded psych evals. She’d recommend him to Jimmy as soon as they were in jail. Hello, Jessamine’s college fund.
But for now, Maria Martin should continue to be eager to please. “Is anything special planned for this morning? I could use more time on the archery range.”
“Excellent idea. We have time before lunch needs to be started.”
Her phone vibrated. Thank you, God.
Frank’s text couldn’t have been better: Maria, Jennifer called in sick again. We’re short two people. I need you in here ASAP.
She showed it to Alex. His face darkened like the best evangelical TV preachers.
“Your boss calls all of you by first name and still orders you around?”
He should talk. “That’s just his way. He’s under a lot of pressure from the company owner to make the cleaning service turn a profit even after a bunch of us were let go for budget reasons.” She texted a reply as Alex watched.
I’m leaving now. I can be there in about an hour.
She put worry lines into her forehead. “I hate to cut my time here short, but I can’t afford to lose this job. It pays more than my other one. I’m really sorry, Alex.”
Nun But The Brave (A Giulia Driscoll Mystery Book 3) Page 21