by Jon Land
“Where is he now, Sergeant?”
“Retired to his home, sir.”
Turwell could hear thunder booming on the other end of the line and gazed ahead to see the storm clouds he was driving straight into.
“What’s he doing inside?”
“We don’t know, sir.”
“I assume you’ve got eyes on the house.”
“We do, sir. But there’s no sign of him through the windows.”
“It’s a one-story house, Sergeant. Where the fuck could he be?”
“Unknown, sir.”
“We may need to consider a breach.”
“Sir, the reverend has that gorilla of his posted at the front door and three more almost as big patrolling the grounds. A breach could get messy.”
“For God’s sake …”
“What are our orders, sir?”
“Orders? Try this. Don’t do a fucking thing until I get there.”
CHAPTER 66
Blountstown, Florida
Jeremiah Rule was busy in his basement when he heard the pounding on his front door. He left the bucket he’d intended to dump down there and climbed back up the ladder, pulling himself through the hatch and storming toward the door. He threw it open to find Boyd Fowler looking down at him, a clearly pissed-off Alvin Turwell standing in his shadow.
“Man says he’s got an appointment with you, Reverend.”
“A standing appointment is what I said,” Turwell corrected.
Fowler ignored him. “I know you said you weren’t to be disturbed no matter what, but I figured the way this man was talking warranted an exception.”
“You did right, Boyd,” Rule said, afraid the stench from his basement had ridden with him back up here. He gazed toward Turwell, who looked hot and was struggling to steady his breathing from rapid huffs and heaves. Sweat had soaked through his sports shirt at the underarms and torso, and beads of it dappled his brow. “The colonel and I have some business to discuss.”
Fowler turned sideways, holding a menacing gaze on the colonel as he passed by. Turwell didn’t say another word until Jeremiah Rule had closed the door behind him with he and the colonel standing just inside the foyer.
“I was worried about you, Reverend.”
And that’s when Rule realized he’d forgotten to close the hatch. “Really? And why might that be?”
“My men told me you’d been behaving erratically. They were concerned the shooting the other day may have rattled you more than you’re showing.”
“It opened my eyes, Colonel,” Rule said, aware only a sliver of the hatch was visible from this angle.
“To what?”
The reverend slid sideways, positioned to keep Turwell’s eyes off it altogether. “To take more charge of my own destiny, not trust it in the hands of another who may not have my true interests at heart.”
“Our interests are the same, Reverend,” Turwell said, fighting not to show how agitated he was.
“And what if mine have changed?” Rule managed, still utterly distracted. “The Lord is sending me signs again, leading me to a place I haven’t identified yet.”
“Your safety is my responsibility, Reverend. That’s why I need to inform you that you’re taking too many chances, venturing out too much with so much at risk.”
“The risk is well worth it. Everything is evolving, Colonel, nothing as it was yesterday or the day before. Even the last minute. It’s gone, vanquished to the banks of history where it will likely be forgotten as most things are. But not His work. I see that now. His work alone endures and His word is the one true truth. The Lord and I had come to a crossroads, and I’m eternally in your debt for directing me which way to go.”
“I don’t believe I follow you, Reverend.”
Thump.
“I am his vessel, his harbinger,” Rule said, tensing at the sound coming through the open hatch, “and I will continue to speak the word of the one true God, serving my purpose to him with all my heart and soul. He delivered you onto me for a reason, Colonel. Our destinies are intertwined. Embrace that and rejoice in it.”
Thump.
“I’m the man who brought you this far. That’s something you should be embracing.”
Thump.
“What was that?” Turwell asked, starting to turn.
Rule maneuvered to place himself between the colonel and the hatch, blocking the man’s view. But Turwell kept trying to peer over Rule’s shoulder in the direction from which the sound had come.
“I have a rat problem.” Rule grasped the colonel’s stare and held it. “Maybe a bigger one than I thought, because you don’t truly believe, Colonel, not in your heart or your soul. You’re a fraud, a charlatan. You’ve sought to use me, so lost in your own self-deception that you never saw I was the one using you, thanks to God. He brought you to me and now your purpose is done.”
Rule detected fresh rage simmering over inside the colonel.
“You really don’t get it, do you?” Turwell sneered.
“Why don’t you shine the light brighter for me to see, Colonel?”
The thump sounded again, but this time Turwell seemed not to notice it.
“You’re a cog in a much greater machine, Reverend, just like I am. You need to accept that and be thankful for it.”
“Thankful for what exactly?”
“That you’re still alive. You weren’t supposed to survive Mobile. You were supposed to be martyred then and there to set up the final attack tomorrow.”
Rule remained unruffled having still not broken his gaze off the colonel. “Well, then I suppose that proves the Lord has my back, even if you don’t.”
Turwell stood rigid, his lips quivering slightly as if regretting the words that had just slipped through them. “He may not have your back next time. You’d be wise to remember that and just do what’s expected of you.”
“Oh, that’s exactly what I intend to do. Do exactly what’s expected of me … by God.”
“I’m warning you, Reverend.”
“Actually, I believe you are threatening me. And when you threaten me, you threaten God. My survival in Mobile only confirms I’m serving His plan, not yours. And nothing you or these others can do is going to change that. See, you’re the one who doesn’t get it. Your purpose has been fulfilled. The rest is up to me.”
“And what does that mean exactly?” Turwell asked him.
“God’s final plan, Colonel. Growing clear to me even now. Boyd,” he called loudly. And then, when the giant jerked the big door open again, “Please escort the colonel out,” he said, still speaking to Fowler as he rooted his gaze on Turwell. “We have more important work before us.”
Thump.
“You should really get that problem taken care of, Reverend,” Turwell said, as calmly as he could manage. “The thing about pests is that they never clean up the shit they leave behind.”
CHAPTER 67
Saint Charles, Missouri
The man from Homeland Security was waiting at the entrance to intensive care at Saint Charles’s CenterPointe Hospital when McCracken arrived. Both the reception and waiting areas were still packed to the brim with relatives awaiting the latest word on the conditions of their family members injured in the terrorist attack. It was a scene Blaine had experienced countless times in his life, always hoping the next would be the last. But it never was.
“Four bodies made it here,” the man he’d first met upon arriving at the Daniel Boone Bridge reported flatly.
McCracken felt a shudder ripple through him. “Except five were found alive on shore.”
“That’s right. One of them is unaccounted for. Care to guess which?”
“The kid I’m looking for.”
“Hell of a world we inhabit, isn’t it?” the man said, his tone unchanged even when he continued. “For
what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
The abruptness of McCracken’s remark seemed to unsettle the man ever so slightly.
“See, I never said anything about the person I was looking for being a kid.”
The man just looked at him.
“I’m guessing you’re Gap, that you serve under an asshole named Robert Carroll. That tells me you were at that bridge waiting for me to show up, expecting me to. I need to keep going?”
“Rest is obvious,” the man shrugged.
“The kid was targeted. The Daniel Boone Bridge wasn’t a random target,” McCracken said, fitting the pieces together for himself as well.
“In my experience, there’s no such thing.”
“They really find him washed up onshore alive?”
“I wouldn’t know. What I do know is that you’re going to stand down. Another forty-eight hours and then the kid gets returned to you. And the same goes for your Indian friend and that old fossil with the broken nose.”
“Forty-eight hours …”
“That’s what I said.”
“I gotta figure you didn’t just pull that number out of the air. Which tells me we’re coming to the end of this,” Blaine said, thinking of the White Death.
“That info is way above my pay grade.”
“I could put you into early retirement here and now.”
“But we both know you won’t, McCracken. You’re not holding any cards, so you’ve got no choice other to play it the way I tell you, or you start getting pieces of the kid sent to you via FedEx.” A pause. “You related or something?”
“Something.” McCracken held the man’s stare and watched him smirk, confident of the upper hand he was holding. “You made another mistake,” Blaine said then.
“Huh?”
McCracken took the phone from his pocket and flashed it. “Remember this? Back at the bridge, when we first met, I dropped it and you picked it up for me.”
“You going somewhere with this?”
“You should have worn gloves, Mr. Edward J. Harm. Nice last name by the way, very fitting.”
Harm’s brow crinkled, his mask starting to crack.
“Right now, that old fossil with the broken nose is visiting with your family. Wife and two kids. Twins, age ten. You made the same mistake I did. You gave yourself something to lose.”
CHAPTER 68
Asheville, North Carolina
The Reverend Jeremiah Rule hit the road as soon as Colonel Turwell was gone, heading north along interstates deep into the heart of North Carolina and his own past. His time of transition was coming, everything he’d been born to do was coming, but Rule still felt the old demons haunting him, refusing to leave him be.
And so he’d taken this second trip into his past, only much further back to his youth growing up with other orphans amid the scents of rust, sweat, and urine. He needed to know himself anew, to confront the parts of his life that had spawned the man he was today, the parts that needed to be excised once and for all.
The orphanage, the only home Jeremiah Rule remembered from his childhood, was nestled in the mountains outside of Asheville, North Carolina, a rustically serene setting that belied the evil that festered like mold. For Rule, the three-story school building that also held a chapel was like a steel hangar; frigid in winter and oven-like in summer with the other seasons irrelevant. It was enclosed on three sides by the various residential cottages barely suitable for human habitation. All structures on the spacious grounds had been painted a gunmetal shade of gray that had darkened in his years there until it appeared black as night even during the day. For that reason Beacher House, as the facility was called, became more commonly known as “Bleak House” after the Dickens novel, and then, even more fittingly, “Black House.”
For the reverend himself, that was a metaphor for the color of virtually every soul that made it out of here, no matter the shade of it when they’d come in. The perimeter of Black House was surrounded by an imposing wrought-iron fence twice the size of the boys gaping up at it. The escapees were always the athletes, the climbers who could scale the iron without impaling themselves on the spiked spokes that topped each rail. But they were always caught and returned to the home where punishment was summarily enforced.
As Rule recalled, Black House fell under the domain of a particularly punitive Jesuit order that could not be bothered with the needs of homeless boys or dispensing sanction on the wildings that dared try breaching the walls and fence. No, that punishment was instead dolled out by the same kind of counselors who had made him hang from the steam pipes that heated the cottages in winter as a boy. The Jesuit brothers involved themselves only in the most serious of cases involving repeat offenders.
Through the dark days of his early youth, Rule recalled seeing some boys walking with pronounced limps and thought nothing of it given the terrible backgrounds from which many of Black House’s residents hailed. Only in his latter years in the home did he realize the limps belonged to repeat offenders who, after their third failed escape attempt, would be tied to their mildew-ridden cot and have their leg bent back until their hamstring snapped. It would heal well enough, but never entirely the same, the modern equivalent of “laming” runaway slaves on farms and plantations not at all far from Black House.
The reverend needed to walk those cold, dark floors again, needed to know himself as he was then so he might know himself better now. He’d taken the old van on the trip, listening to it sputter and clank, the heater struggling to push any heat out at all, its musty interior smelling of stale cigarettes, spoiled food rotted under the seats, and the flatulence of its previous owners collecting like clouds near the broken dome light. The smells, the farts especially, rekindled memories of Black House, sleepless nights spent sobbing while boys alternated passing wind in the blessed sleep that eluded Rule.
He needed to know those cottages again, the creaky bed frames and moth-eaten mattresses. His recollection of those years brought with them not a single happy memory, not one. There was never anything to look forward to—not holidays, or birthdays, or friendship, or sports, or toys, or games. Nothing. There was only the stink and the pain that left sleep as the sole solace on the nights it would come unbroken for any length at all.
After an eight-hour drive, just past dusk, Rule arrived at Black House to find much of the steel fence collapsed or stolen away for scrap, and not a single building untouched by vandalism. Some of the residential cottages had collapsed under the weight of snow and ice. Still more had been upended by the savage storms that occasionally came ashore to wreak havoc on the North Carolina countryside. The same storms had uprooted trees that smelled sour and dead. No one had removed them, just as no one had removed the refuse of the cottages, or done anything about the dark shell of the main building, most of the windows long boarded up with the remainder missing and exposing the interior to the ravaging elements.
The reverend entered the grounds through a chasm where Black House’s huge, heavy iron gate had once stood. Much of the fence, though, still remained, save for jagged gaps missing steel harvested for salvage. He walked the grounds with only a cheap flashlight purchased at a rest stop where he’d also grabbed some Little Debbie snacks. Recollection of the paths now strewn with brush and muck returned with surprising clarity, as if he had never left these grounds at all. He continued about the overgrown, untended grounds, praying silently for guidance in his journey, reaching a cracked and fractured window of a dilapidated cottage that froze him in his tracks.
I lived here once… .
And that’s when Jeremiah Rule glimpsed the face of a boy staring back at him from inside.
CHAPTER 69
Asheville, North Carolina
But it wasn’t a boy at all, just a trick of the moonlight’s reflection in the falling night. He was looking at his own face, the features warpe
d and distorted by the broken glass. All the same, the illusion sent his heart racing, down now to just a splotchy flutter as Rule approached the cottage entrance.
This was the very cottage in which he’d been forced to hang from the steam pipes, the cottage he’d returned to in later years as a counselor himself. The big heavy door had splintered away, just chunks left at the hinges where it looked kicked in, probably by local kids out for an adventure or adults in search of more to salvage and pawn. Rule entered out of the chilled air into something even more cold and dank. Because there was something for him here at Black House, in this very cottage; something he needed to know, something he had left behind that was a mystery even at this point of the journey.
His cheap flashlight made enough of a dent in the darkness for Rule to see the cottage as it had been fifty years ago. He looked up through the collected dust and cobwebs to find the steam pipes, from which he’d once hung by his fingers, were gone, torn from the walls so their generally worthless steel might be salvaged for something. The irony of trying to find any value in this place was striking. Rule took a deep breath and the air flooding his lungs felt rank and spoiled.
Suddenly, he smelled the sweat of unwashed bodies and urine festering on underwear that went weeks without being laundered. Rule shined his flashlight upward to find the steam pipes suddenly restored amid the dull glow. More than that, he saw a young boy hanging from one, gritting his teeth against the inevitability of falling. Beneath him stood a glowering, grinning counselor, poking at the boy with what looked like a garden stake found amid the tended areas of the grounds.
Poke, poke, poke …
The boy grimacing each time the stake left him swaying again, the blisters on his hands starting to pucker and pop. It was hard for Rule to watch, even in his mind, hard to watch himself suffer as he had so all those years ago.
Only the vision conjured by his mind wasn’t of him at all. The boy starting to lose his purchase on the steamy tin had light hair, while his had been dark. A straw-colored mop of waves, with tangles and cowlicks sticking up this way and that. Being prodded and poked with a stick by a counselor with hair cropped military close on the sides and bunched tight on top.