Deep down, Faith knew she felt the same way.
“I know, it’s hard,” Maia continued. “But this is too crazy to take chances with. If there’s even a chance that the Devil planned for this and they’re walking into a trap, we’re still a wild card the longer we stay out here.”
“Okay,” Faith said, nodding. As Cindy’s campers disappeared, Faith returned to her book and tried to force the bad thoughts out of her mind.
In the screened-in classroom, Douglas could tell that plenty of his charges wanted to go with Cindy, but he also knew that most were too weak by this point to make the walk, himself included. They’d consumed most of the bottles of water they’d brought in, some kids simply taking sips in order to have something to put in their mouths before Douglas realized he was going to have to ration them.
“God will come, but for
us
, not them,” Douglas said, his voice hoarse, but nonetheless triumphant. “You will see soon enough.”
He looked around at the kids, seeing at least some hopefulness on a their faces, which made him feel hopeful as well, his message getting through.
He smiled. “Let us pray.”
It took Mark and Phil three long hours after their encounter with Father Billy to make it to the highway. They hadn’t said a word for the first half of that trek and barely a word for the second half either, a couple of grunts as they traded food and water from their packs. It was if they were terrified that the dream would end if they spoke aloud and it would turn out that Father Billy
had
killed them. Or, more likely, was walking just behind them, waiting to correct his earlier mistake in letting them go.
But that was really only part of it.
Both were still extremely troubled by the promise they’d made to Father Billy and felt the eyes of God staring down at them in anger. When they finally made it to the highway, they still had a few more miles to go before they reached a gas station where Mark used a pay phone to call for a cab to pick them out. In his wallet, he carried an emergency credit card in his name, but this was the first time that he’d actually planned to use it. He told Phil that he thought he could withstand the wrath of his parents when they got the bill.
“How long before they get out here?” Mark asked the dispatcher at the cab company. “Yeah, sorry about that. We’re way out.”
After he hung up (“Probably a half hour wait,” he told Phil), both boys looked at one another and knew they were both considering picking the pay phone back up and dialing 911 to bring in the police, paramedics, the National Guard, whatever it would take, but they just couldn’t do it.
“He’d get arrested, he’d go to jail and he’d just start killing people in there until God stopped him there, too,” Mark rationalized. “Maybe this is
our
test to see if we can keep our word to God...”
Phil shot him a look and Mark just sighed. They went inside the gas station and bought some food as well as a couple of drinks, eating and drinking them in the parking lot as they waited for the cab. When it finally arrived, forty-plus minutes later, their salvation finally felt real and immutable.
“Where to?” the cab driver asked when they piled in the back seat, Mark slamming the door behind them.
“De Soto,” said Phil. “I’ll give you better directions once we get closer, okay?”
“Sure thing.”
Phil sank back into his seat and, within minutes, fell asleep even though he’d initially fought against it. Mark, too keyed up to do same, stared out the window, forcing himself to look at nothing at all.
It was mid-afternoon when they reached De Soto city limits, Mark gave the driver directions to Phil’s house, where they’d decided to camp out as Phil’s father and stepmom were currently out of town, visiting with Phil’s grandmother in San Antonio. Ten minutes later they arrived, Phil waking up as the cab pulled into his driveway. Mark signed the credit card receipt, leaving a forty percent tip, and they both grabbed what little gear they had and headed inside.
As they walked in, Mark immediately went for the freezer in the kitchen, seeing a stack of frozen pizzas waiting.
“Want me to nuke you one?” he asked, turning to Phil, but his friend was already gone. Mark closed the freezer door and walked down the hallway towards Phil’s bedroom, stopping short at a closed bathroom door.
“Phil?”
“I’m going to grab a shower,” Phil called from the other side of the door as he turned on the water. “I’ll get something when I come out.”
“Okay,” Mark nodded and headed back towards the kitchen.
In the bathroom, Phil sat on the toilet seat, staring at his shoes as the water in the shower stall whistled down the drain. He hesitated, but then put his hands together, interweaving his fingers.
“Dear Lord, I know I’m the last one to be asking for favors, but it’s not for me,” he began. “What I mean is, there are a bunch of people who could really, really use your help right now...”
Thirty-one campers, one more than a third of the number that had brought in a mere three days earlier, made their way out of the camp right around the time Phil began his prayer. Cindy had counted them twice, partly to know how many to keep track of, but also because she wanted to look in their eyes and see if they showed any signs of possession. Of all the campers, these were some of the ones she knew the least with a few exceptions, but when she looked into their faces, she saw one thing unifying them; they were all
survivors
. Each had that look of nervous awareness on their faces, a certain distrust of the rest of the pack that had kept them alive this long. She wondered how that would work in a fight as any feeling of teamwork might fall away under pressure and it might become every camper for themselves.
But she was optimistic.
“All right,” she told the group, now assembled around the broken Jeep. “We’re going to take turns pushing the vehicle, four people on the back bumper, one on either side with one driver.”
A 16 year-old girl named Nancy Powell had been tasked with sitting in the driver’s seat to steer and brake. Cindy had selected her because not only was she one of the lightest people in camp, maybe 100 pounds soaking wet, but also because she was a nervous type and the last thing she wanted the driver to do was allow the Jeep to pick up any kind of real speed and get too far ahead of the rest of the campers. While the Jeep wasn’t an absolute necessity, Cindy had said that some of the kids might get tired and it would be okay for them to sit in the back for some of the journey.
The real reason, however, was that she felt it would have the psychological effect of giving people something solid to hide in if things got bad, even though it couldn’t fit all of them at once. A group of thirty on open ground was one thing. That same number gathered around a would-be tank that could be locked up tight should the Devil attack, well, she hoped it made everyone feel less exposed and more confident in their mission.
“We’ll be working in shifts, so everyone’ll get a turn on the Jeep,” Cindy continued. “It is the job of everyone else to be the eyes and ears of the group. Eyes on the road, eyes on the woods.
Anything
out of the ordinary and you call out. No one will be left behind, but we need everyone to stay close to the vehicle at all times for this to work.”
After a moment spent surveying the faces of her charges, she added, “May God be with us.”
The kids nodded and Cindy let a camper named Patrick Noto lead the group in prayer. As soon as they had all said their last “A-mens,” Nancy climbed behind the wheel of the Jeep, Cindy took up her position pushing the vehicle on the driver’s side door and the group began moving it out of the parking lot. It was only a few seconds before they started picking up speed and a minute later, they were out of the parking lot and onto the road. There were a couple of furtive glances back in the direction of the screened-in classroom where the prayer circle was staying behind, but pretty soon, the camp was well behind them and they were a few hundred yards down the road.
For Cindy, leaving the camp had a euphoric effect.
At first, everyone had been incredibly cautious and as quiet as the surrounding woods, which betrayed nothing of what might lie just within the trees. But as time passed and everyone shared in the burden of pushing the Jeep, some climbing on top of the hood or the roof with their stakes, the atmosphere changed to one more akin to a jovial nature hike. People made jokes that had nothing to do with their current situation, there was some horseplay and when the Jeep did pull ahead, the kids all had to run to catch up, laughing all the way.
When Cindy finished her turn pushing, she walked out ahead of the group, figuring that was where a leader should be and looked out ahead with no fear. She looked up to the blue, cloud-strewn sky and imagined, for a moment, that the Devil had finished his business with them and was content to leave them be. The possession of David and the others turned out to be him “doing his worst” and now, once repelled, he wasn’t about to try anything.
The open road ahead seemed to confirm this line of thinking and Cindy began imagining herself at home, in bed, soon after dark. She wondered what that would be like, trying to assimilate back into her old life after all of this. Would it even be possible? Would she even want to?
“
Smoke
...”
Cindy turned around, having heard a word spoken, but wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. It turned out to have come from a boy named Andre Gonzalez who was pointing out towards the horizon from his perch on top of the Jeep.
“Smoke,” he repeated.
Cindy looked where he was pointing, seeing a thick plume of black smoke coming from the woods directly ahead of them. Her first response was to feel relief, seeing it as a sign of humanity that might ensure a rescue even earlier than they’d anticipated. But then, she realized the cloud was too thick for a camp fire, too expansive.
Two other campers soon chimed in.
“Smoke! Fire!!” they cried, alarmed.
Cindy wheeled around, having heard something different in the voices of these two kids and saw that they weren’t, in fact, referring to the smoke she and Andre were looking at. Instead, they were pointing at a dark, ashy cloud rising directly over the woods to their right. She could smell the fires now, the scent of burning wood and foliage hanging in the wind.
Suddenly, there was a distant, muffled explosion and a camper screamed, who Cindy recognized as Nancy, the Jeep driver. Everyone looked left and saw a rapidly expanding cloud of smoke and fire shuddering through the woods to the east, causing the trees to shift as if having been blown by a heavy wind.
“What the heck is going on?” Cindy exclaimed, confirming to her charges that she was as intimidated by this turn of events as they were.
Then, they heard a second, distant explosion followed quickly by a third, even further away; each time the scent of burning trees hitting them first followed by the sight of black smoke rising over distant trees. Cindy, her eyes going wide, looked all around and saw that the first plume they’d spotted had now been joined by four more on the horizon. They were still easily a quarter of a mile away, but as the plumes all seemed to be moving towards them, the blood in her veins went ice cold.
That’s when she realized that they’d walked right into the Devil’s trap.
“Oh, God.”
IX
“Hey! Hey, quit it!
Seriously
– it’s getting in my eyes!!”
But Faith was laughing too hard to hear Maia’s words as she splashed her friend. They had decided to explore the lake, look for signs of life or a means of escape, more out of boredom than hopes of actually finding anything. They never went onto land, but would occasionally be enough in the shallows that they could stand up for a moment on the lake bed, which is when Faith took the opportunity to splash Maia again.
“Stop it!!” Maia howled, then found her footing and splashed Faith back. “You’re like a two year-old!”
Faith laughed, ducked under the surface and swam over to Maia. When she got there, she tried to yank her under, but Maia managed to wriggle away, pushing herself out of Faith’s arms as she tried to swim to safety, but Faith managed to grab her again anyway. Maia splashed her in the face, causing her to lose her grip and Maia dove under the water and away.
“Truce!” Maia called when she broke the surface again, a few feet away from the maniacally-grinning Faith. “Truce!!”
Faith pretended she was going to splash her again, but then wrapped her arms around Maia’s torso and brought her in close to kiss her. They’d both tiptoed around the previous night’s make-out session that morning, each wondering if they were going to keep it up or if it was an embarrassing one-off. But then, for no reason whatsoever, Maia had kissed Faith on the cheek, a sweet kiss more than romantic and after that, they’d found themselves kissing each other at odd intervals, two people just happy to be falling in love.
Another reason they’d taken to the water was because they’d gotten pretty sunburned that morning and they were looking for shade. They found it under high outcroppings like The Rocks (which they quickly deemed too unsafe to hang around under for long) or overhanging sweet gum trees. Naturally, they kept an eye on the woods knowing that anybody could be right there within the trees, but they shared an unspoken belief that “whoever” the killer was would be preoccupied with Cindy and the others and wasn’t going to stoop to stalking nobodies like them.
“Oh, it’s so beautiful out here,” exclaimed Maia, momentarily slipping away from Faith and floating on her back out away from the shore for a moment.
Faith swam over, treading water and stared up at the sky as well. Striations of white, puffy clouds had etched their way through the blue like lines on sheet music, stretching from one horizon to the other which dulled the brightness of the sun. Maia reached over and held Faith’s hand as they floated along.
“If this is the Rapture and we’ve been left behind on the Earth with the others, I’d love to just find a place far away from everybody; learn to farm, learn to hunt, maybe, and just live in the middle of nowhere,” Maia said. “We knew some guys like that in Colorado. They’d saved up all through high school, bought a van and drove it to the base of the Rocky Mountains where they were trying to start a marijuana farm. It was like they were functionally homesteading.”
Faith nodded, though she wasn’t entirely clear on the concept of “homesteading,” much less farming pot, but she liked the idea of moving to Colorado, though, getting away from her family and school and, most importantly, being with Maia.
“Can you imagine?” Faith asked. “Forget all this college prep crap, getting a job, graduating at the top of the class, GPAs – just know what your life is going to be and starting it right, right now. No more waiting for it to happen.”
Maia nodded, holding Faith’s fingers a little tighter in her own. “Just you and me...”
“You and me,” Faith echoed, closing her eyes as she let the water splash up against her half-submerged face and around her body.
Suddenly, she felt Maia’s fingers tense and pull away.
“What?” she asked.
“Look,” said Maia, now upright and treading water, pointing back across the lake towards the camp.
Having thought Maia must’ve seen somebody in the woods or, worse, coming towards them in the water, Faith was surprised when she looked out to the west and saw a tremendous black cloud of smoke moving across the horizon like a thunderhead. It looked like an atomic mushroom cloud rising out of the woods, but unlike with an explosion, this pyrocumulus monstrosity was expanding without hurry, fueled by one great ongoing blaze rather than a single, over-and-done calamitous event.
“It’s a forest fire!” exclaimed Maia. “And it looks like it’s coming our way...”
Faith stared on the smoke and knew immediately that it was anything but a natural event.
It didn’t take long for panic to descend on Cindy’s group. The counselor had suggested that they move forward, try to outrun the gathering fires as they connected in front of them, but after only a few minutes of pushing on, every camper could see the same thing happening – the plumes of smoke joining to form a sort of great horseshoe of fire, with them in the center. Even worse, they began seeing orange flames licking the tops of trees in each direction, some as close as a few hundred yards away, rapidly encroaching on their position.
Though they didn’t seem to be in any immediate danger of being burned alive, the smoke had begun to flow in with the ferocity of a sandstorm. Hot and thick with embers, the wind carried it directly in the lungs of the campers who were then wracked with coughs as their body attempted to expel it. It was seconds later that the first kid collapsed, clawing at their throat as they began asphyxiating.
A more terrifying sight the campers couldn’t imagine. Though many could barely see through her tear-and-ash-filled eyes, the group quickly broke ranks and started trying to outrun the blaze back to camp.
But the more they screamed and the harder they ran, the quicker they pumped the smoke into their lungs and moved that much closer to their deaths.
Flight paths.
This was what had concerned Father Billy when he’d been considering hi methods of last resort should large groups of campers attempt to leave Camp Easley before he was finished with them. He knew that the smoke from a fire out at the lake would take hours to be substantial enough to alert people on the ground as the highway was so far away and it wouldn’t be seen in the next town, or, at least, recognized as anything other than a distant cloud for hours.
Better yet, if it happened in the afternoon, it would easily disappear into the night sky at dusk, which would only be a couple of hours away, giving him an additional dozen hours or so, which he figured would be more than enough to accomplish what he’d hoped to.
This left one problem – flight paths. At night, though the smoke would go unseen from the ground, the glowing orange of a real, multi-acre forest fire would be unmissable from the air.
So, he did a little research on flights coming in and out of DFW and Love Field in Dallas, knowing that planes not on approach or departure would be at too great an altitude to see the fires unless they continued for days. In fact, he discovered that there was only one commercial flight, a commuter route that went between Baton Rouge and DFW, that even came close and it would have to be a few miles off course and directly above it for even the most eagle-eyed passenger to spot it. He felt confident that it would be a non-issue.
So, when he’d surreptitiously watched Cindy assemble her children’s crusade to head down the road, he knew that it would be far too many people for him to fight on his own and the impetus to start the planned conflagration was upon him. He had not expected to live through the entire camp experience, truly believing that God would eventually have to strike him down, but if this did not happen, having the entire place razed by flames might give him an out that would allow him back into civilized society with no one the wiser, which might allow him to try again somewhere else.
With that in mind, he had left the campers to their weapons-building and moved out the trees one last time.
“You love the faith-inspiring coincidence, correct?” Father Billy murmured as he moved through the woods, occasionally glancing skyward. “This way, you don’t even have to take a human life. Send a thunderstorm, send a light shower and you’ll save all these lives, Father. Anything like that could be seen as an everyday meteorological occurrence, but these children wouldn’t have to die. I’d
know
, but I’d be the only one. Please, God. This burden delivered unto me is too heavy. I beg you. Let these killings end.”
Father Billy stopped in his track and actually waited for an answer this time. He looked up to the late afternoon sun and wondered if it would be the last sunset he’d ever see and, if it was, was he at peace with that?
The fires were to be started by sixteen propane tanks suspended around the woods at hundred yard intervals on ropes. The plan was to go around, light fires underneath them and wait for the flames to superheat the tanks, which would then explode. He’d cut rough trenches from each blaze to the road which he’d filled with accelerant, a mix of kerosene and gasoline, which he hoped would direct the blaze. Combining that with the dry underbrush of the drought-stricken thicket, the truth was, the fire might even burn out of control through potentially dozens of square miles, maybe even hundreds if it went unnoticed and picked up steam. In fact, it might cost more lives than just the campers.
But as he mapped it out, he knew that if it got to this point, he would no longer care.
He’d
wanted
to be stopped. He’d begged God to turn the poison in Constance and the others’ canteens to sugar. Demanded He grant him heart attack the second before driving a spike into the neck of the whimpering Pamela as she stood over her dead boyfriend’s body a night that felt like it was almost a lifetime ago. His fondest heart’s desire was to have but one camper fight back against him with the strength of a lion and slay him first or even that the PCP-afflicted athletes simply wake up with headaches instead of being driven into a kill-crazy rampage.
But this didn’t happen and it was taking apart Father Billy’s soul. He had never felt so far from himself in his life.
As he began joylessly lighting the fires under the propane tanks, he imagined lying down next to them, allowing himself to be immolated as well and letting the cards fall from there. He wondered if the rains might come
then
, once his life was extinguished, but then everything he’d have worked for would prove meaningless and that was one option he ultimately wouldn’t allow himself to consider.
Cindy ran and ran and ran, her lungs aching, her eyes burning with every step, but she continued on regardless. All around her, she saw flames creeping through the trees, sending burning trunks down into her path. She has started out with a group of campers, but they had all fallen away. She knew they were dead and knew she would soon be as well, so grossly had she underestimated the inferno.
She looked up as a tree consumed by fire cracked in half and came barreling down straight for her and replayed the events of the last twenty-four hours quickly in her head.
How could she have been so wrong?
Back at the camp, Douglas Perry and the prayer circle campers smelled the coming smoke as it wafted into the camp, but they continued praying.
“The flames won’t reach us,” claimed Douglas, who stared out the windows towards the woods, watching the smoke waft closer. “They will stop before they reach the camp and go no further.”
His followers, weakened now from over twenty-four hours of fasting, could only nod and continue their prayers.
Out on the lake, Maia and Faith circumnavigated the shoreline until they were on the opposite side from the camp, about a half mile of water between them and the swift-moving blaze. Though the initial retreat had been frantic and harried as they started smelling smoke almost immediately after seeing the cloud, once they were far enough away, they actually felt safe enough to climb out onto the shore and try to dry off.
“We can always jump right back in,” Faith said. “But I’m pretty sure the Devil’s occupied.”
As they looked back towards the great black cloud another word rising over the distant woods, they were in awe, the setting sun casting it all in an orangish-red, Apocalyptic glow. Unlike a more typical atmospheric formation, this one appeared to be boiling up out of the earth itself as if a volcano had suddenly made its presence known in the East Texas woods.
“I wish I had a camera,” said Maia, watching the smoke rise ever-higher. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Faith nodded, but said nothing. She was staring at the tiny pinpoints of light that occasionally showed themselves, fire rising off the tree tops. Every so often, a tree would bow then fall, soundlessly, out of frame. She knew that off in those distant woods, this great, crashing torch was likely destroying anything unlucky enough to be in its path, Cindy and the other campers likely in the midst of the maelstrom, but from where she stood, it might as well be happening on the moon for all the effect it had on her enjoyment of the sight.
That’s when Maia glanced down to her shoulder, a strange look on her face.
“What is it?” asked Faith.
“Rain,” said Maia with surprise. “I felt rain.”
“Our Channel 7 exclusive Doppler Radar Report brings us news of a thunder shower developing east of here, currently in the Patterson/Lake Carlisle area,” said a nattily-dressed man in a bowtie on the television. “There’s no telling if it will reach us here in Dallas, but we could certainly use it, couldn’t we, Dave?”
The anchorman to whom the TV weatherman was making his joking aside to duly nodded, and then suggested “in all seriousness,” that indeed, Dallas could use the rain.
“Wow – that’s gotta suck for whoever’s still out there,” said Mark, who was munching on his second microwave pizza. “Wonder what God, in His infinite wisdom, is trying to pull with that.”
But Phil couldn’t be flippant. Staring straight at the radar image on screen, his panic was rising.
“Fuck!” he exclaimed.
“What?” asked Mark.
“What do you mean, ‘what?’” Phil replied, disgusted. “Faith and Maia! They’re out on that diving platform. If it starts pouring down, they’ll have to come on land. And if they do that, they’re screwed. How the hell can God do this?! It’s like he’s
helping
Father Billy! What the fuck?!
Rain?!
”