The Salvation State

by Marcus Damanda

  He jammed the flat end of the tire iron under the base of the window frame and hammered it deep with his palm. Then, using both hands and lowering his body for leverage and weight, he tried to force it up. It would be quieter than breaking the window, if it worked.

  It did work. The lock at the top of the wooden frame snapped as though it had been made out of Styrofoam, and its metal clasp rattled onto the floor inside. The window slid up freely, as easily as if someone within the building were raising it to let in the nighttime summer air.

  Daniel let the tire iron drop to the grass at his feet, holding the window open with one hand.

  I should have brought a flashlight. Stupid, stupid.

  Then he remembered he didn’t even own a flashlight.

  Anyway, it wasn’t like he was a professional. If there had ever been a case of him learning something on the fly, this was definitely it.

  He let go of the window and was relieved when it did not immediately come back down.

  Now—his mind raced as he pulled on the rubber gloves—I’m committed.

  Grasping the frame, he hauled himself up, ready to push himself through and plunge headfirst inside. He had a fleeting thought that his father would be so ashamed of him, right now—

  —when the inside office light came on, illuminating the room completely.

  In the instant before he reflexively let go, tumbling back onto the grass outside, he saw how the room had been laid out for him. It had been prepared quite simply, an undeniable message: Trap. Sucker.

  The desk had a pile of money on it—loose bills, tens and twenties and fifties, all lying in a disorganized and glorious heap upon a mostly covered offering plate, as though waiting for him to dive in and swim in it.

  Mom, he thought, falling onto his butt, not knowing if he was calling on her for help or apologizing.

  The lights came from ground-level at first. Red and blue, flashing everywhere, emerging from behind the building and then from the street. Shadows cut through the flashes, walking toward him, guns and clubs drawn, not running. Taking their time. No words, no commands.

  And then from the church’s very roof, a heavy clicking sound overrode all. Shielding his eyes even as the police converged on him, Daniel saw the shadow of a police air-ski. Like a giant spider, it clicked and clacked, first on the roof, then lifting into the air with a hiss and hovering over him. Four of its legs retracted as it descended right in front of him, while the other four alternately photographed him in a series of blinding, shuttering flashes.

  A setup. Why? I’m not important.

  He felt hands lifting him, then handcuffs. Then, even as the air-ski stopped taking pictures, a punch to his face, to his stomach. He doubled over.

  At ground level the air-ski powered off. The driver unbuckled himself and climbed down. “Church-robber,” said a voice in the dark. “Garbage.”

  Daniel felt the vision in one eye fade under swelling. He coughed and tasted blood. “Just kill me. Don’t take me to jail.”

  The voice in the dark laughed at him. “Take you to jail?” It chuckled. “We wouldn’t dream of it.”

  Daniel waited for the gunshot, the club over the head—whatever it would be, it would happen now. He closed his eyes, and against every fiber of willpower in his being, he cried.

  Then the voice said, “We’re not going to kill you either.”

  ****

  “Let’s play a game,” Rebecca said. That’s all it is, she insisted to herself. There is no way I’m doing this for real.

  She and Caroline sat in the back of the van. While there were still two lanes for DTR and Prodigal Sons to share, the two vehicles drove side by side. Caroline was waving and making silly faces out of her window—and getting them in return, from one boy at a time. At present the youngest of the three boys had pressed his mouth against the glass and breath-inflated his whole lower face, steaming the glass. Caroline laughed, hopelessly distracted.

  “Caroline…,” Rebecca tried a second time, as patiently as she could. I hardly know him, she reminded herself. And things are bad enough at home as it is.

  Caroline sat back, still giggling. “What? Remember, you promised to help get me back up to speed in my True Science notes. It’ll be lights-out as soon as we’re back, but—”

  “Yep. We’ll get ’em right after bells, before breakfast.” She lowered her voice so only Caroline could hear. “I’m talking about now.”

  “Like, here in the van now?” Caroline asked, matching her tone.

  Rebecca nodded.

  But if the game were to become real, it would have to happen on Friday. That’s when Brian had said he could do it. That’s when he had said he would be there.

  There was no way he was actually serious, though. There was no way he’d actually go through with it. It was just … crazy.

  “What game?”

  “It goes like this,” Rebecca said. “One of us comes up with an impossible task—something that simply cannot be done. I’ll go first, just as an example. Then, you think of the first step in a plan to make it happen. I think of the second step, and then we just take turns.”

  “Until there’s a whole plan.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Just a game?”

  “Yeah,” she said, meaning it. “Pass the time.”

  “All right,” Caroline said, eyes lighting. “What’s this impossible task you have in mind?”

  ****

  Sherrie Forester sat up on the couch. Sirens. She had slept through their approach. They were so close now, the noise nearly hurt. She stood and went to the open window, thinking it an inconvenience and a shame to close it. It was a nice night, cool for August.

  “Daniel?”

  He did not answer.

  But those weren’t fire engines. They weren’t ambulances. No—ever since Pete’s arrest, she could differentiate the sound of police sirens from rescue vehicles only too well. From two floors up, she saw there were three of them. They parked right in front of her building.

  She saw the lights in the apartments above her, below her, and across Cathedral Street all go out at once. When the police came in force, people in neighborhoods like Sherrie’s didn’t come outside to watch. They retreated, tried to become invisible, curled in corners with their children, and prayed that they weren’t the ones about to disappear. She might have done the same herself, if her lights had been on. She wished Pete had been better at making himself invisible, back in the day.

  She turned away from the window. “Daniel?” she called again, scanning the apartment, which was now partially bathed in a kinetic glow of red and blue. His bedroom door was closed. Over the din from outside, she could hear nothing from his room. How could he sleep through this?

  But then suddenly her own lights came on.

  She blinked and rubbed her eyes. Why had that happened?

  She had an entirely ridiculous thought that the power company had made an error. For a fleeting moment, she even wondered how long it might last. But Sherrie Forester was no fool. It took her mere seconds to understand the police were here for her or for Daniel.

  The realization struck before the sirens went quiet, before the sound of boots on the stairs.

  She didn’t try to flee the building. She ran to her son’s bedroom and flung open the door, shouting his name. Her breath caught when she found the room empty. She clutched at her chest, wondering what he had done.

  From behind her, she heard a soft thump of metal on her entryway mat.

  She had heard that sound before. So had Daniel. It was the sound of her doorknob and its locking mechanism breaking off and dropping inside the apartment. A police soft-entry punch gun.

  Six cops came in at once, four male and two female. The men ignored her and fanned out, opening cupboards, riffling bedroom drawers, and upending the trash bucket in her kitchen and the recycling bin by the table. They sifted through papers, ignoring everything else.

  One of the women laid a cloth bundle on the tabl
e, then vanished back into the hall. The other took Sherrie by the wrists, cuffed her hands in front of her, and sat her in a chair in front of the cloth bundle.

  “What’s the charge?” she asked. “Where’s my son? What have you done with him?”

  None of them spoke to her directly. One of the men ransacking the apartment did, however, address the other cops. “This is hers, I guess,” he said, producing a handwritten catalogue of unpaid bills, setting it on a counter, and going over it with a palm scanner. “And it’s got every letter of the alphabet.”

  “You sure?”

  “I am.”

  They were going to write something, pretending to be her.

  Sherrie was close enough to read the tag on the officer who had cuffed her: Maureen Clive. “Maureen,” she said. “Please tell me about my son.”

  Officer Clive undid the bundle, revealing a gun. She drew on a pair of latex gloves, letting them snap. She then took the gun and placed it in Sherrie’s cuffed hands.

  It was a 9mm Army-issue Samuel Judgment. Pete had owned one when he had worn the uniform. For all Sherrie knew, it was the exact same weapon.

  They’re putting my prints on it.

  The second female officer returned, unrolling a large plastic zip bag and laying it on the floor.

  You’re going to do this? Kill me without even talking to me? Without telling me what you did to Daniel?

  As if in answer, one of the male officers said, “We’re good. Do her.”

  Sherrie thought, Then fuck it. And fuck you. She raised the gun to Officer Clive’s face and pulled the trigger.

  It clicked, empty.

  The cop wrenched the gun free from her, took a clip from her belt, and slapped it in. All the while, her demeanor suggested no acknowledgment whatsoever that Sherrie had just tried to kill her. She was going through the motions, performing a task so routine that she could do it on autopilot. How many others had fired the empty gun at her?

  But it was loaded now. Officer Clive touched its barrel to the soft flesh of Sherrie’s temple, averting her own face to spare it from the imminent splash of blood, skull, and brains.

  “Tell me what you did to my son!” Sherrie screamed.

  She never heard the shot. In the moment the gun went off, all she knew was the returning dark.

  But after that, there was light. And in that light, there were answers. There was even love.

  A familiar face too.

  Chapter Six

  The Little Things

  Friday, August 21

  Damascus Teenage Retreat

  Morning

  “Jenny Dinsmore to the office, please,” the voice of Miss Gabrielle said over the all-call. “Jenny to the office.”

  Rebecca watched through narrowing eyes as Jenny—who was already done with breakfast and had been chatting away the minutes until morning services—sprang to her feet, squealing and clapping. She may as well have twirled her way out of the cafeteria, the production she made of it.

  “Maybe she’s in trouble,” Caroline said hopefully as they sat with their trays. She frowned at the dry pancakes and scanned the table.

  “Somehow I doubt it.” Rebecca located the butter and syrup and passed them to Caroline.

  Jenny was two years younger than Rebecca, but the two of them shared a birthday.

  Today.

  At thirteen, Jenny was coming of age. She’d be taking her Tribulation in Temptation Vows in the afternoon. Later there’d even be a small party. Word was that, for this, her parents would even attend tonight’s communion.

  The girls prayed their grace silently.

  “Happy birthday,” Caroline said.

  “Thanks,” Rebecca said, yawning, head in one hand and fork in the other.

  “Want me to stand up and get everyone to sing? Bet they’d do it.”

  In a Gregorian chant, Rebecca thought. “No, I’m good.”

  “Together we make thirty. Scary, huh?”

  “Not as scary as you actually doing math in your head.”

  Turning thirteen was a much bigger deal than fifteen. Rebecca knew she shouldn’t be angry, shouldn’t be jealous. Her own thirteenth birthday had been as big an event as she could have wished for—and better than Jenny’s could possibly be, here at DTR. But couldn’t Jenny’s parents have waited until after her birthday to send her here? It was a teenage retreat, after all, even though the bracket, technically, was twelve to seventeen. Poking her food without eating it, Rebecca wondered what the little twit had done to be landed here with such timing.

  The all-call would be someone on the phone for her. Mrs. James, the teachers, and the prefects all had mobile devices, but there was only one landline at DTR, and that was in Mrs. James’s office. It was one of the reasons—and one of the ways—they discouraged that kind of contact from home.

  Could be an emergency, Rebecca thought. Then she put her fork down, disgusted with herself for even thinking that.

  “Nothing a little liquid sugar won’t fix,” Caroline said, misinterpreting the gesture and sliding the syrup back over.

  Rebecca played along. She didn’t want to be dramatic. Mom and Dad might call. It’s really early right now. They might not even be up yet. And they’ll definitely send the card.

  “The card” was a tradition at House Riggs. Along with whatever small presents mom and dad could afford, she’d gotten a money card every year from them, which increased by two dollars with each passing birthday. “For inflation,” Mom always said.

  More than the money, though, it was the card itself that mattered. It never had any words on it. Instead, it consisted completely of pictures taken on Dad’s digital camera throughout the year. Rebecca had kept every one of those cards, and they stood in a grand line on one of her bedroom bookshelves at home.

  “Rebecca, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Rebecca said, then changed her mind. “It’s just, I was supposed to go to the Baltimore Aquarium today. There was going to be a whole group of us. We were going to take the church bus.”

  “Oh,” Caroline said quietly. “That stinks.”

  Rebecca appreciated the honesty. She would not have been in the mood for Caroline to try to convince her it was no big deal. It would have been what most people would do. It would have been fake. “The rest of them are probably still going,” Rebecca said. “But my mom planned it especially for today. For me.”

  Silence.

  Eventually, Caroline said, “We’re halfway done. Seven more days.”

  Rebecca wondered if Brian would really be at the statue of St. Stephen tonight. It would be crazy, him doing that. But then, she hardly knew him. Maybe he was that crazy.

  “There you go with the math again,” she said. Forcing a smile, she quickly added, “Thanks, Caroline. I mean it.”

  But I just need to make it through today.

  She told herself to suck it up, to not be a baby about things. She had not forgotten what her father had nearly done to her, where she had nearly ended up. I can’t forget that. Never.

  Things could be worse.

  ****

  Second Salvations Camp 6: Angel Island

  Midday

  “Are you ready to eat today?” said the voice. “Are you ready to drink?”

  The voice was young and male. Whoever owned it could not have been much older than Daniel. The voice was kind and sympathetic. Patient.

  “Are you ready to pray?”

  Daniel had not said much since his capture. He certainly hadn’t prayed. He did not understand what was happening to him, but whatever it was, he wasn’t holding out hope for a supernatural rescue.

  He had been in the dark ever since being blindfolded at the Church of Eternal Witness. He thought the first place he had been taken was a police station, but if so, he hadn’t been there long. While there, they had taken off the handcuffs, stripped him of everything but the blindfold, given him a medical evaluation, allowed him to use the bathroom, and then redressed him in the same clothes he’d been
wearing at the time of his arrest. They’d replaced the handcuffs with leather cords, which were actually worse than the steel. Most times he could not feel his hands, even as his wrists burned and itched as though with infection.

  There had been a helicopter ride. All through it, there had been two voices—one male and one female, both adult, authoritative, and argumentative with each other—talking over him and not to him.

  The owners of those voices had eventually led him to this place. It was a storage shed, he guessed, since the walls were a thin metal and the floor was concrete. And here the voices had left him, hands and feet bound, to be helplessly chewed upon by insects or spiders or whatever creepy-crawlies were accosting him endlessly during the days of unbearable life-sucking heat.

  The voice that came to him now was different. It spoke of friendship, of fellowship, and of an end to the torment. “God will forgive you,” it said. “God always forgives.”

  Daniel struggled to make words. His throat hurt so badly.

  “God is better than people in that way, as in all things.”

  Daniel nodded, not knowing if the boy could even see him, blindfolded as he was. He felt like it was dark in here, in spite of the heat. No light burned through the cloth over his eyes, not even a hint of it.

  He heard a bowl or a platter—whatever it was, it had the smell of stew—being set upon the floor. Then the boy gave him water. Daniel sucked at the canteen until he coughed and spluttered. His whole body responded, seeming to expand with life. His head cleared somewhat.

  “Are you ready to pray now?”

  “Yes,” he finally managed. His throat still felt scorched, though less so, and his own voice sounded foreign in his ears. His insides were an empty bag. They pinched him, complained at him. Daniel had thought he had known what hunger was back in Pittsburgh, but he hadn’t. He’d remained silent as long as he could. Now, suddenly, he was hungry enough to accept food he could not see from a stranger, and to pray for it. He would beg for it if the stranger so commanded him.