Into Captivity They Will Go

by Milligan, Noah;

  As the truck got closer, the driver killed the lights, and soon it was close enough Caleb could somewhat make it out. It was a smaller truck, boxy, with a rail of KC lights on top of the cabin. In the bed appeared to be a couple figures, men, women, he couldn’t tell, and they were moving. The engine idled, so Caleb couldn’t tell if they were talking or not, but then he saw something that alarmed him: the flickering of what appeared to be a cigarette lighter.

  He shook his mother, and she stirred.

  “What?” she mumbled. “What do you want?” She pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders and kept her eyes shut tight.

  “I think you should see this.”

  “What is it, Caleb? I’m exhausted.”

  “Seriously, Mom.” He shook her shoulder again, harder this time. “You need to see this.”

  The light took, and a small flame burned in the back of the truck. Caleb could make out the features of a man. He was young looking with a shaved head. He had on a white T-shirt that was too big for him, the sleeves flapping in the breeze around his smaller arms, but then Caleb couldn’t see him anymore. He threw the item burning in his hand, and it collided with the side of their home. That’s when Mom bolted upright and pushed Caleb aside. A second collision banged against the side of the wall, and Caleb could smell grass and rubber burning.

  “Run,” Caleb’s mom said. She didn’t scream it. She didn’t seem panicked. It was just an order, like she was telling Caleb to wash the dishes or take out the trash. “Run,” she said, and Caleb obeyed.

  When he swung open the door, the truck tore out of there, its tires squealing and kicking up dirt. By the time Caleb and his mother were a safe distance from the trailer, the truck was already speeding down the dirt road, too far to make out any identifying characteristics. They’d never know for sure who it was, but the damage they’d done was clear. Their home was engulfed in flames. Caleb and his mother had no phone to call for help. No hose to quench the flames. There wasn’t even a fire department close enough to help in time. Soon, all their belongings burned, and Caleb and his mother just stood there watching, not knowing what else they could do.

  Others woke. They came to help, dousing the flames the best they could with buckets of water, forming a line back to the lake, sending bucket after bucket after bucket, but there was nothing to be saved. In a matter of weeks, Caleb and his mother had watched their home be destroyed twice. It wasn’t until around dusk that they were able to extinguish the blaze. What remained was a black, smoldering pit, full of ash and stinking of sulfur. There wasn’t anything else to do but rebuild, but that would wait until later. They instead washed up the best they could, enjoyed a small breakfast of biscuits and water, and then convened for their morning sermon.

  “The end is upon us,” Caleb’s mother said. She stood at the pulpit in the newly built church. She stood alone, tired and worn, but as she spoke, she shook with passion and with fury. “‘And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, it is done. And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great.’”

  As his mother spoke, Caleb felt a burning inside of him. It started out in his stomach, a slight tremble, but it grew in intensity, catching fire and raging through his muscles and bones.

  “‘And the great city was divided into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell: and great Babylon came in remembrance before God, to give unto her the cup of the wine of the fierceness of his wrath. And every island fled away, and the mountains were not found. And there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven, every stone about the weight of a talent: and men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail; for the plague thereof was exceeding great.’”

  “Amen,” Sam said. “Praise Jesus.”

  “I know you can see it,” Caleb’s mother continued. “The seventh plague is upon us. It is here. We are living it now. The earth is being destroyed. Our leaders are allowing it to happen. And our neighbors have turned against us.”

  Caleb’s entire body stirred. The energy cascaded through him, his mother’s words spurring him on.

  “The final battle between heaven and hell is being fought right here, in our very own community. The tornado. The destruction. The violence. It is time for us, the chosen, to stand up, and it is time for us to fight.”

  Caleb erupted into tongues, the Lord’s words flowing through him. They filled him up. They heated and expanded his body until he felt ten times his normal size. He felt indestructible. He felt immortal, and Scoot and Brandon lifted Caleb above their heads and raised him above the congregation, carrying him across the loving arms of his brothers and sisters in Christ, warriors of God.

  CHAPTER 7

  SCOOT GOT SICK ON JULY 4TH. AT FIRST, HE JUST lost a bit of weight. He was a big kid, muscular and lean, and so he helped the men with construction projects and manual labor around the community, mending fences and digging ditches and building furniture. He was strong and tough and good with a hammer, and Caleb was, he hated to admit, jealous of him. Jesus had been a carpenter after all, and though Caleb could help out with simple tasks, measuring the lumber, hammering nails, Scoot could build a dining-room table from scratch. He’d go out and chop down the trees. He’d cut the wood. He’d sand it down. He’d fashion it together. It was just something he could do, an inherent trait buried deep down in his bones.

  But then he changed. His muscle mass deteriorated. His complexion turned wan. It was slow at first, hardly noticeable. Caleb noted something strange the morning of the fourth. They were preparing for a communal feast where all the members of the congregation could eat and gather together, give thanks for all they had, break bread and pray together as one voice. To help prepare for the feast, Brandon, Scoot, and Caleb set up tables. There were about a dozen of them in all shapes and sizes. Scoot often liked to show off, but this morning was different. He got winded. He seemed lethargic, like he hadn’t slept in days. Before, he’d have been able to pick up the tables from the bed of Sam’s pickup and hoist them above his head, carrying them into the worship hall almost effortlessly, but that morning he breathed heavily, bent over at the waist. His normal smile gave way to a pained grimace, his normal Herculean self worn down to something average, soft even.

  “Sure you’re okay?” Brandon asked.

  “Yeah,” Scoot said. “Yeah, of course. Just tired. That’s all.”

  Scoot turned quiet. He sweated until his shirt was soaked, and he breathed through his mouth. But he didn’t stop. He tried to pick up his pace, straining to lift and willing his feet to move forward, one after the other, dragging just above the ground. Caleb worried. He’d never seen Scoot like this. Usually a ball of kinetic energy, Scoot was an electron in an excited state. He never tired. He never struggled. He never fell ill. It was almost against the laws of physics how he worked. But when he went back to the truck the final time, Caleb knew he was hurting. He bent at his waist and leaned against Sam’s truck, taking deep breaths with his face turned toward the ground like he might vomit.

  “You’re not,” Caleb said. He put his hand on Scoot’s forehead, but he jerked away. “You’re burning up. Let me get your parents. Sam. My mom. Somebody.”

  “I’m fine,” Scoot said. “Really. Let’s just keep working.”

  “Just take it easy. Sit over there. We’ll get the rest of the chairs.”

  “You two wimps?” Scoot tried to laugh but coughed instead. It was deep and raspy, choked with phlegm.

  Caleb found Sam inside the worship hall, pushing pews against the walls so as to make room for the tables, and asked him to come. By the time they returned, Scoot sat against Sam’s truck, trembling. He’d vomited since Caleb had left, and he moaned and rocked back and forth, his arms crossed in front of him. He’d deteriorated quickly, and it scared Caleb. He’d seen people sick before, with bronchitis, pn
eumonia, even cancer, but he’d never witnessed someone turn so pale, so fragile, so hot to the touch within minutes. He wondered when and if it would stop. At this pace, it seemed Scoot might die within the day.

  They got Scoot to his feet and took him to his home, where they found his parents. They put Scoot in bed and got him a washrag to put over his forehead and a glass of water to drink. They didn’t have anything else to help him. No Tylenol or Aspirin to curb the fever, nothing to numb the pain. All they could do was give him fluids, a bed to rest, and prayers for his quick recovery. Caleb’s mother soon arrived, and they deliberated what to do next.

  “He needs to see a doctor,” Scoot’s father said. He was a tall man, soft-spoken, with a gangly build. When he walked, his joints appeared to move in opposite directions, his shoulders up, his knees forward, his elbows back. It was as if he were always moments away from falling over, but Caleb admired him—he was a good man, a godly man, giving and kind.

  “How?” Caleb’s mother asked. “He’s too weak to make it into town. And we have no idea what it’s like there now. We haven’t been there in weeks. It could be chaos for all we know.”

  “We have to do something,” Sam said. “The boy is suffering.”

  “I know he’s suffering. I saw him, Sam. That’s not the point.”

  “I’m going whether you give your permission or not,” Scoot’s father said.

  “It’s dangerous. You saw what they’re capable of. They tried to kill us. They burned down our home.”

  “He’s my child, Evelyn. My child. If it were Caleb, you’d do the same.”

  “He needs you here. With him. What will happen if they hurt you? If they won’t let you leave? If, God forbid, they kill you?”

  “I have to take that chance.”

  “We’re in a war here.”

  “Stop,” Sam said. “Stop.” He had a pained expression on his face, one of great consternation, like he had to command his blood to continue to flow through his veins. “The child is sick. We have to go. Period.”

  Caleb’s mother looked at him. “Okay,” she said, her face toward the ground, hands raised in resignation. “Fine.”

  Sam and Scoot’s father climbed into Sam’s truck, and Sam turned the engine. A plume of black smoke kicked back out of the exhaust pipe, and as they inched down the drive toward the gate, Caleb took off running and jumped into the bed of the truck. He didn’t even think about it. It was just instinct. His friend was in trouble, and he had to do what he could to help. Find medicine. Find a doctor. It didn’t even matter what. He had to do something. His mother yelled for him to stop, for Sam to stop, but they didn’t listen, instead heading out on the gravel drive toward the highway to town.

  Grove was deserted. There were a few people. Men, mostly, still rummaging through the destroyed buildings, picking at trash that had been scattered by the breeze—empty cans, mud-covered shopping bags, shredded blankets—looking for anything that might be useful. It was obvious help hadn’t come, the state, the feds, nobody. Most of the people had abandoned their homes, hit the road if they had a running car, staying with relatives in nearby towns or just finding what they could where they could, maybe a motel in Joplin, a job bussing tables at a roadside diner. What was left in Grove could hardly be described as livable any longer. A tent city had sprung up in the middle of a park that had once been filled with the laughter of children playing on swings, slides, and seesaws. Now it teemed with people cooking over open flames, five or six per fire, wrapped in dingy shirts and shorts, their conversations hushed and clipped. Several hacked and coughed as Sam, Scoot’s father, and Caleb passed by, covering their mouths with dirty handkerchiefs or the inside of their elbow. None appeared to have eaten a decent meal in weeks. Cheeks sunken. Complexions the color of pea soup.

  To Caleb’s surprise, nobody paid them much mind as they searched for help. He’d expected a visceral reaction, one of disdain and scorn for their foretelling of the coming apocalypse, their very damnation. Rocks to be thrown. Curses spat. But that wasn’t the case. They didn’t cast aspersions to Caleb or Sam or Scoot’s father. No sideways glances. No judgment. Instead, they kept to themselves, wrapped up in blankets to fend off the mosquitos. Caleb didn’t blame them, though. He’d learned before about the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance. Caleb had seen their denial, and he’d seen their anger. Now they’d reached acceptance. Or maybe it was depression. Caleb wasn’t sure.

  Near the back of the park they found a larger tent. It looked like something from out of a carnival, though it was made of simple blue tarp instead of the red-and-white candy stripes. A smell creeped from there, something nauseating, debilitating, a stench that seeped inside of Caleb, wrenched his insides, making him gag. It reminded him of his uncle’s pig farm. He raised about 150,000 pigs per year in forty low-slung, warehouse-like barns. Caleb had visited it once when he’d been about six or seven, and his uncle let him go into one of the barns. Inside he found about fifteen hundred sows locked up in small cages, unable to turn around. They spent their whole lives like that, his uncle explained, eating there, sleeping there, even going to the bathroom there. Their waste was vacuumed out through large vats, but despite the tubes Caleb couldn’t get over the smell. It was a mixture of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, poisonous gases that could, if breathed in for a time, kill him.

  Inside the tent, Caleb, Sam, and Scoot’s father found rows of men, women, and children lying on makeshift cots. They coughed. They wheezed. They moaned. A woman near Caleb squirmed in pain. She was a younger woman, perhaps mid-twenties. Red hair. Freckles covered her face. A complexion like she suffered from jaundice. She sweated, her dingy blanket soaked with perspiration around the hem. To his shame, Caleb had the immediate impulse to run. Not to help. Not to grab water and a cool rag and try to comfort her. Instead, he wished to flee, his fight-or-flight instinct kicking in so strongly he had a hard time catching his breath, his inhales raspy, quick, and urgent, his exhales clogged in his throat. The place frightened him, and he couldn’t help but cover his mouth and nose with his shirt lest he should breathe in whatever these people were ailing from. They looked like they were dying, and for the first time in his life Caleb feared death.

  He wondered what this said about him. He was to usher the chosen into the kingdom of heaven; he was a virgin birth, the Second Coming of Christ, but his reaction to those suffering was nothing Christ-like. It was pedestrian. Common. Cowardly. He wasn’t any better than the rest who had fled town, who had burned their home to the ground. Or perhaps, he thought, Jesus could have been afraid, too. Maybe when he’d healed the leper, the soldier, the sick in Peter’s house, he’d been afraid, but he acted anyway. Afraid he’d catch the skin disease, that he, too, would become feverish. But it didn’t stop him from acting. That was what separated Jesus from man—the ability to help despite his dread, and so Caleb went to comfort the woman in spite of his misgivings, his fears of what would happen if he became sick like her. But before he could reach her, Sam grabbed him by the shoulder to stop him.

  Near the center of the tent was Dr. Cox. He looked exhausted. Hair disheveled, eyes bloodshot. He had a stethoscope on and was listening to a teenage boy’s heartbeat. He had a pained expression on his face, one mixed with deep concentration and thinly masked despair. He didn’t wear latex gloves or a doctor’s lab coat but instead had on a plaid button-down, and blue jeans stained dark with mud. When he noticed Caleb, Sam, and Scoot’s father near the entrance to the tent, he didn’t acknowledge them. He just stared at them as if determining whether or not they were real.

  “Dr. Cox,” Sam said.

  The doctor took out the earbuds to the stethoscope. He didn’t offer a hand to shake or a greeting.

  “There’s a boy sick at the park,” Sam continued. “Scoot Finch. Fever. Nausea. Pain. He’s delirious and needs help.”

  “Dysentery more than likely.”

  “Is that what everyone has?” Caleb asked.


  The doctor nodded. “There’s been an outbreak. No IVs. Little clean water or antibiotics. We’ve had two die already.”

  “Where is everybody?” Scoot’s father asked. “Why isn’t the government helping?”

  “We’ve asked,” the doctor said. “We’ve been made promises. They told us there would be doctors and medicine and food and water and shelter, but it hasn’t come. They’ve done nothing.”

  “Can you come see my boy?” Scoot’s father asked.

  The doctor swallowed like his throat hurt but was trying not to complain. “How long has he been sick?”

  “Today. That’s when the fever started.”

  “He’s been weaker than normal,” Caleb said. “Not quite Scoot for about two or three days. Sluggish. Fatigues easy. Stomach pain.”

  The doctor nodded. A patient moaned. Another coughed. The tent filled with raspy breathing, a man hacking up phlegm, the gags of a child. Caleb wondered if it was safe for them to be in there, if the bacteria was seeping down into their lungs with every inhale, infecting them, embedding right down into their cells. The doctor’s words rang in his ears: two had died already.

  “Is there blood in his stool?” the doctor asked.

  “No,” Scoot’s father said. “Not that I know of.”

  “Is he responsive?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can he hold a conversation? Lost his appetite? A lot of weight?”

  “A little, I guess. Yeah.”

  The doctor walked to the other side of the tent. Sam, Caleb, and Scoot’s father followed.