Tom, standing on the ladder, poked his head above the floorboards, but came no further. The heat was oppressive here, even at mid morning.
Seeking relief, Piper gravitated toward the air vent. He noticed freshly splintered wood around one of its red-painted edges. Gently, he pushed the vent. It fell out of its fixture easily, landing on the ground outside with a dull thud.
Inside his office, Piper paced back and forth upon the carpet. His so-called security chief stood just inside the doorway. “God damn it, Tom! This is your fault! You’re not supposed to let this happen!”
“Sorry, boss. Just hope it’s a deprogrammer and not the cops.”
“It’s the cops. All the way from San Francisco. They didn’t buy our story after all. They’re focusing here now. Searching for Daryl Finck and Esperanza’s corpse . . . and you.”
“Could’ve been a deprogrammer,” Tom said. “Hired to kidnap someone we’ve hidden. Trying to find our safe houses.”
“Either way, we can’t afford to be penetrated!”
Tom slapped his own forehead. “Guess what! I think I know who our intruder is!”
Surprised, Piper stepped toward him. “Who?”
“It’s one of the new people. Big, heavy set guy. Name’s John something.”
“Why him?”
“Caught him outside the men’s guest quarters one night. Claimed the door hadn’t been locked, claimed he had insomnia. I believed him because we’d found those sleeping pills in his belongings. Remember?”
“Yes, I do,” Piper said, nodding. “We have to know if it’s him for sure. We can . . . we can check his shoes against the footprints on the wall.”
“And if it’s him?”
“I don’t know yet. I need time to think.” He began pacing again. “In the meantime, put him someplace safe.”
John sat in the passenger seat of a black Mercedes-Benz SUV hybrid. It was traveling much too fast, in his opinion, along a bumpy, eroded trail through a cornfield. The vehicle shook and growled and tossed up a tan fog of dirt in his side view mirror.
With one hand on the dashboard for balance, John turned to Tom Mahorn. “The ‘fiery oracle?’ What’s that?”
“A great place to meditate.” Tom white-knuckled the wheel, his temple bulging with a purple vein the size of a caterpillar.
“But why do I have to meditate?”
“Only The Wizard knows. He told me to take you here.”
Through the front view window, a tall white dairy barn appeared and grew until it filled up John’s vision. Five yards short of the barn, Tom hit his brakes and cut the engine.
“Follow me,” he said, throwing his door open.
They entered the barn through a pair of broad double doors painted green. On the ground floor, dairy hands monitored dozens of copper and white cows attached to strange metal contraptions.
“Those milking machines?” John asked Tom, trying to initiate some friendly small talk. Tom grunted in the affirmative. John tried another question. “What do you call these cows, anyway?”
“Jersey cows.”
“I don’t suppose I could work here? Looks like fun.”
“We’ll see.”
They rushed past a huge black bovine, sequestered in a corner stall. It had long, menacing horns.
“Hey!” John said. “Is that a bull?”
“Not just any bull.” Tom flashed his teeth of cigarette-stained runts, a mouth injury of a smile. “That’s the bull The Wizard put to sleep in Tijuana.”
“What’s it doing here?
“Normally, if the bull survives the bullfight, the butcher kills it, and sells the meat to the spectators. But he refused to kill that one.”
“Because of what happened?” John said.
“Right. He said no one would buy the meat. Too afraid it had evil spirits. So we offered to give it a new home. We’re building a separate corral for it now.”
The rear door led into a corral the size of a football field. Scores of cows meandered. Stepping carefully to avoid the cow patties, they approached a small, wood-framed, tin hutch near the back fence. The structure stood four feet high. Its width was about six feet. Propped against the front wall, oddly enough, were a pair of weathered wooden baseball bats.
Tom used a key on the tiny door’s padlock and swung the door open. “Welcome to the fiery oracle. Now get inside.”
John dropped to his knees and crawled forward. As soon as his head passed through the doorway, he understood the first part of the fiery oracle’s name. Hot air swooped across his face like a steamy barber’s towel. He didn’t dare touch the tin walls. When only his feet were still outside, Tom yanked his shoes off.
“Hey!” John said. “Why’d you take my shoes?”
“They look worn. I’ll get you a new pair.” Tom slammed the door shut. John heard the click of the padlock, but tried to open the door anyway. Too late.
“Hey, Tom, why’d you lock me in here?”
“So you can’t do anything but meditate.”
“Hot as hell, Tom. How long do I have to . . . meditate?”
“Till The Wizard says stop.”
John heard Tom’s footsteps departing. “Tom! Tom!” No answer. He listened until Tom’s footsteps had receded into silence. By that time his eyes had adjusted to the dimness, and he took a look around.
There were no windows, but shards of light sneaked through cracks in the crudely made structure. The floor—the closest thing to cool in this hell—was dirt, mixed with a little dead grass. A clay pot, empty, yet urine-scented, sat in one corner. No water. No water at all.
Why had The Wizard singled him out for this sweat lodge?
John really had no idea. He stripped off his shirt and wiped away the beads of perspiration already forming on his brow. Then he folded the shirt several times, turning it into a wee pillow, and tried to sleep, hoping that fatigue would overcome his chronic insomnia and his uncomfortable quarters. He’d nearly drifted off when thunder began.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom
!
It was the loudest thunder he’d ever heard. His ears hurt so much he cupped them both.
Strangely, bright sunlight still streamed through the cracks. He could see the tin walls rattling violently.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom
! “How’s that meditation coming along, Brother John?” asked an unfamiliar male voice from just outside the hutch. The voice chuckled to itself.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom
! “Yeah, how’s it going in there?” asked another male voice, only deeper. John didn’t recognize the second voice either. “Let’s hear from you, Brother John.”
The baseball bats
, John thought. They each had one of the old, weathered baseball bats he’d seen resting against the hutch. The two men outside were using them to pound the tin walls.
“Stop!” John said. “Stop already!”
The thunder stopped almost immediately. “You’ll be hearing from us every ten minutes,” one of them said. “We understand you need round the clock meditation.”
Laughter and footsteps trailed off.
Marilyn took a winding dirt path through the woods, one question on her mind. Where was John Richetti?
She hadn’t seen him at dinner the night before, or at breakfast this morning. But perhaps she would in another ten minutes. She was on her way to the red farmhouse, where Bob Marsh would soon begin a tour of the farm for the new recruits. The tour was intended to help the recruits choose preferences for their work assignments. If John failed to show again, then she would begin to worry in earnest.
“Hello, Sister.” The greeting came from a small-built man approaching from the opposite direction. He wore a straw hat and dirt-caked work clothes. His gray eyes blinked steadily. Not only steadily but freakishly fast. She gave him a nod as they crossed.
The man had a neurological problem, likely due to a head injury. It was the third such case she’d observed on the farm. Neurological damage of that magnitude was rare in normal society, but not always inside a cult. It surely meant that beatings were ongoing here, vicious beatings, meant as disciplinary measures.
She’d always assumed that one day the cult leaders would direct her to perform some repugnant act—illegal too, perhaps, or immoral—that she would categorically refuse to do. And when she did not obey, she understood now, her refusal would earn her a severe pummeling.
She emerged from the woods. In the pond behind the red barn, a few white-feathered ducks drifted among the lily pads.
Inside the barn, a horse whinnied, attracting her there. She gave each of the equine residents on the ground floor a quick hello before remembering to exercise her role as a sleuth. John had told her to search everywhere that she found a safe opportunity to do so, taking nothing for granted.
Beyond the horse stalls she came upon the tack room and peered inside through the open door. A barrel of feed. A pair of western saddles. Brushes and bridles on the walls. Nothing out of the ordinary here.
At the very back of the barn, past a pile of hay bales stacked floor to ceiling, a wide set of wooden stairs led up to the second floor. She climbed, noticing a soft hum that grew increasingly louder. A wooden door stood open at the top of the stairs. A steel padlock dangled from a metal staple in the door frame. She gained the landing and stepped through the doorway.
The entire second floor was a single, open space. Dark rafters loomed overhead. The wooden walls had weathered gray, and the floorboards were crowded with rows of freezers: eggshell white, commercial-size, humming freezers. Perhaps thirty in all.
Nearby, two men in work clothes labored side by side, assembling small brown shipping boxes from tall stacks of flat cardboard. Printed on the sides of the assembled boxes were the words,
Natural High Farms
.
“Can we help you, Sister?” said one of the men, a black man with a gray patch in his short-cropped hair, though he wasn’t more than thirty.
“Um . . . maybe.” She spoke now in her best dumb blonde voice. “I was looking for carrots, or sugar cubes, to feed the horsies.”
“Check downstairs in the tack room.”
“Thanks!” she said, but did not descend. Instead, she approached two women working side by side in front of an open freezer. They were filling one of the assembled cardboard boxes with clear plastic bags containing a dark frozen liquid.
“Ick,” she said. “What’s that stuff?”
One of the women, without breaking her work rhythm, shoved a thick clear plastic bag at Marilyn’s midsection. “Have a look.”
The bag was so cold that it burned her fingers a bit. The contents were a dark red, and block printing on the bag indicated that it contained one liter of human blood, type O Positive.
“You’re loading up a truck for Colorado,” Marilyn said.
“That’s right.”
The black man called out. “Only authorized personnel are supposed to be in here, Sister.”
“My bad,” she said. “I’ll be going now.”
On her way out, she noticed a pair of black, oval-shaped metal tanks with bright yellow
Liquid Nitrogen
warning messages printed across their sides. She surmised, on her way down the stairs, that the black tanks were for human sperm storage.
Outside the barn’s front door, Marilyn saw a commercial truck in the adjacent parking lot, a steel gray eighteen-wheeler. The cult, it seemed, was in the habit of placing their human body fluids in produce boxes and transporting their precious cargo in ordinary, refrigerated produce haulers. But why?
Marilyn shuddered at a sudden thought. She turned and scrambled back inside the barn, dashed into the first empty stall she came upon and shut the door. Out of plain sight, squatting against a wall, buttocks resting on her heels, her eyes filled with tears, and her body quaked with repulsion at a mere possibility: that agriculture wasn’t the only type of commercial farming being conducted on the premises, that The Wizard was farming human beings for profit.
Sunlight streamed into John Richetti’s dark, steaming cubbyhole unexpectedly, stabbing his eyes. A gruff, vaguely familiar voice called his name. Before John could answer, a pair of hands gripped his ankles as he lay on his back and dragged him all the way outside through the little doorway.
Disorientation, sleepless exhaustion, and possibly heatstroke pinned him to the manure-scented ground. He squinted up at the sun, clouds, and sky. A shadowy round face appeared, hovering a few feet above his own, a partial eclipse.
“Hello, Brother John,” Tom Mahorn said. “How you feeling?”
“What’s the right answer?” he said, rasping from thirst.
Tom chuckled. “You’re ready to get with the program again.”
“I’m ready.” He gripped Tom’s offered hand and allowed himself to be jerked to his feet. He felt weak and woozy. Tom handed him a brand new pair of shoes.
Dancing to the beat of a bongo drum, Marilyn gazed up at a darkening sky. The clouds hanging low over the meadow looked like giant blue ticks at feast. It was going to pour soon.
The new recruits were being placed in a trance via a bizarre rain dance. Rather than imitating some Native American ritual, they were—at the direction of Bob Marsh—following the rhythms of their own “inner bliss.” They danced in assorted styles and differing tempos—a ballerina here, a belly dancer there, a scattered pair of spinners, a disco throwback, a twister, a jigger, a clod, a spasmodic, a high-kicking chorus girl. They danced in a loose circle around Bob, who sat cross-legged, solemnly beating his bongo. Marilyn herself danced a slow hula. It was the least taxing dance she knew.