The Waking Dark (35 page)

“Your ass is kind of big for a bikini.”

“How many times I got to tell you, stop staring at my ass.”

No one spoke until the soldiers – who apparently weren’t soldiers after all – had finished and retreated back to their side of the highway. No one spoke for a long time after that, not until they’d picked their way deep into the woods, away from the soldiers and the body already surrounded by flies. Not until they had come to terms with the fact that there was officially nowhere to go.

“Final containment,” West said. Though his limp had gotten even worse, clearly paining him with every step, he’d insisted on carrying Cass. Daniel doubted unconsciousness and shallow breathing could be a good sign of anything, and vaguely remembered – again from TV – something about keeping concussion victims awake. But they couldn’t exactly take her to a hospital, and there seemed little to do for her otherwise but make sure she didn’t get left behind.

One
by
one,
Daniel thought, thinking of Ellie, who he didn’t know well enough to miss, but missed nonetheless.
That’s how we’ll go. Till there’s nothing left.

Milo had, somehow, fallen asleep in his arms.

Small favors.

“The whole town’s a laboratory,” Jule said. “An
embarrassing
one. You think GMT wants people to know what they did to us?”

“I knew it couldn’t be the military,” West said. “The government wouldn’t do that.”

“Yeah, big relief,” Jule said. “Because we’re much better off dealing with a massive defense contractor with all the money in the world and a huge incentive not to go to prison. You think they’re not going to do whatever they can to shut us all up?”

“So they cut off the phone lines,” Daniel said.

“Cut us off completely,” West said.

“They wait,” Daniel said. “They watch.”

“And when they’re done?” Jule mimed an explosion. “They put us out of our misery.”

“They can’t just erase an entire town,” Daniel said. “That’s crazy. Even if anyone
would
do something like that – you don’t think people would
notice
?”

“Who’d notice if Oleander wasn’t here?” Jule said.

“They could blame it on the storm,” West said. “Maybe they already did. The whole world probably thinks we don’t exist.”

“We could try to turn ourselves in,” Daniel said. “If we’re immune —”

“If they cared, you don’t think they would have tried to get their hands on us before they put a hole through her brain?” Jule said.

“We could go back,” West said. “Tell people what’s really happening.”

“
You
want to try that?” Jule asked. “You want to go tell Mom and Dad they’re maybe evil and definitely about to get blown up by the fake U.S. government?”

West didn’t answer.

“Over at my place, that’s just another day,” she said. “But I still wouldn’t count on them not to shoot the messenger.”

“We could hide out here,” West said, “but…”

But in the morning, the Watchdogs would be back. And even if they survived another day, there would inevitably come another night, and then another morning, and how long could they survive in the woods, getting chased, getting hungry, foraging for berries none of them were equipped to identify or squirrels none of them were willing to eat. Long enough to last until a bomb dropped and ended all their problems at once?

They hiked along the edge of the woods, searching for a weak spot, but the barbed wire stretched along the perimeter, dotted with what appeared to be motion detectors and cameras and nasty-looking wiring that suggested an electrified fence. If they were going to escape, it wouldn’t be here, and it wouldn’t be tonight.

“She’s not breathing right.” West lowered Cass to the ground. Her breaths were too shallow and too few, with alarmingly long pauses in between. Daniel shook her and called her name, but her eyes stayed closed. Her forehead was hot to the touch. West wasn’t looking too good himself. And despite the sleeve she kept pressed to her wound, Jule was still bleeding.

“We have to get out of the woods,” he said.

“We can’t let them find us,” Jule said, a hard edge to her voice. “I won’t go back to…
that.
”

“I think I know a place,” he said. They would have to make it back through town without being seen, and once there, they’d be stuck in the heart of the town they were so desperate to escape. Which wasn’t as daunting as the fact that they’d need to trust someone to keep their secret. Someone who was a child, and thus safe from the R8-G – but someone who was a child, who they had no reason to trust.

But then, they had no reason to trust each other.

“Somewhere no one would ever think to look for us,” he said.

He didn’t say:
Somewhere
we’ll be safe.

That seemed too much to ask.

Grace was awake when the knock on the door came. She was nearly always awake these days. Sleep didn’t seem like something she deserved, not until she succeeded where she had failed, twice now. Not until Cass was gone.

Her mistake, she decided, had been outsourcing the job to someone else, to a whole town of someone elses. That had been the coward’s way out. “If you want something done right…,” she murmured, from her makeshift bedroll beneath the crib.
Do
it
yourself.
That was her father’s voice echoing in her head, her father before Owen’s death, when he had talked too much, embarrassingly much, always spouting his shopworn words of wisdom, proud as if he’d coined the phrases himself.

Do
it
yourself.

When she was very small – older than Owen had been, but not much – her father had briefly convinced her he had magical powers. It wasn’t so much the coins he pulled from her ears or the thoughts he managed to successfully “read” (most of them about dessert) as it was her eagerness to believe that her father had powers commensurate with his wisdom. He seemed to know everything – so surely, if magic was possible in this world, if you could control events with your mind and predict the future and see through a face and into a soul, her father knew how to do it. And she’d been so desperate to believe she lived in that kind of world.

He had turned out not to be omnipotent, or particularly potent at all.

He had turned out not to know everything.

But for a moment, when the knock came again and she swung the door open to reveal a bunch of teenagers on the doorstep, all of them smeared with dust and blood and fear, she was inclined to believe once again. She barely heard them explain what they were doing there, or beg for her mercy, or promise they had answers to all her questions and could reveal terrible things. It didn’t matter why they thought they had arrived at her house, because she knew the real reason. They had – she believed, she finally had to believe – been guided there. Because the football one was cradling a limp body in his hands, a limp body that was still breathing. It would, as directed by Grace, be carried up to the guest room and laid out on a bed, where it would wait for her, like a present, unable to defend itself. Where it would sleep like a baby, one might say.

Grace swung the door wide and ushered them in, letting them babble, pretending to listen, trying not to smile. If her father wanted her to
do
it
yourself,
he could hardly have made it easier for her to try.

They slept well that night, though none of them expected to. Grace felt the drowsiness take her while they were all still huddled in the living room, telling their confusing tale. Deciding that killing Cass would be all the sweeter once she’d opened her eyes and could see death on its way, Grace allowed the football player to carry her up to her bedroom, where she hadn’t slept since the storm, but slept now, hard and deep, dreaming of blood.

Daniel fell asleep curled around Milo, lulled by the steady rise and fall of the boy’s chest, and the way he smiled as his eyelids fluttered, as if he were dreaming them into a better day.

West dreamed of Nick, and though he told the phantom
You’re not real,
he let the thin arms curl around him and the lips press to his bruised cheek and thought that maybe it would be all right to lose the fight, to die, if death would be like this.

Only Jule thought of Ellie as she closed her eyes and tucked her knees to her chest, wondering at the girl’s transformation in the woods, at her history with Baz, at her determination not just to save Jule and Cass, but to put herself in their place. And she resolved, the next morning, to repay the favor. Maybe she couldn’t save the town; maybe she couldn’t even save herself. But she could at least do what she had to do to find Ellie.
I
don’t believe in you,
Jule thought,
but
she
does. So watch out for her.
It was the decision about what she would do in the morning that finally let her give in to sleep. She dreamed of Baz, and her right hand twitched, reaching for an invisible knife.

They would not have slept, if they had known.

The deacon kept Ellie safe, as he’d promised. Long enough to spirit her away from Baz and his Watchdogs; long enough to get her back to the center of town; long enough to rally the people of Oleander, who’d had their hearts set on a burning, and would take what they could get.

They could not get the killer they’d been promised – not that day.

But they could get a fallen saint. A false prophet. Judged guilty, by public acclamation, of fraud and sacrilege, of making fools of the townspeople and dealing slanderous insults to the deacon. She had spoken so often of the need for cleansing, for purging the town of all sin before God struck again with His other fist. She had warned He would not hesitate to punish the many for the sins of the few. She was a liar, but in this, she spoke the truth. So said the deacon, so said the town.

“Your sins will be forgiven,” Deacon Barnes had assured Ellie in the woods. He promised her so again under the moonlight, as the first stars cut through the dark, and she was bound to the pyre and delivered to her fate.

The deacon yanked her hands behind her head and tied them to the post. Clair and Morgan bound her feet and rued that they had ever been her friend. The wind screamed, and it was Oleander, crying for her blood. It was Ellie, crying.

She had always imagined there would be more dignity in martyrdom.

She was not Joan of Arc; she was not Jesus. She was not stoic, and she was neither silent nor brave. She was seventeen years old, and she was about to be set on fire, and she wanted someone to hold her and tell her it was going to be all right.

“The Lord will not abide false prophets,” the deacon shouted to the crowd. “We will not abide!”

Ellie’s mouth was too dry for words.
Please,
her lips said, and God had no answer.

“Oleander shall be purged of sin,” the deacon shouted. “And the purging shall begin here and now.”

He beckoned her mother to the stage.

No one knew the truth about Ellie King. Not her mother, who had read her diary; not Deacon Barnes, who had heard her confession, and promised to cleanse her sins. He could see her stain, but not its cause. Not the wound from which the tainted blood flowed.

Only God saw that.

God, and Ellie, every time she looked in the mirror.

There had been a baby.

In the time after Baz, after the night of the bucket and the bath, after she’d been cast out but before she’d been saved, there had been a baby. A month, first, of uncertainty and fear and secret vomiting in the deacon’s guest bathroom – all of which, she’d told herself, could be ascribed to the stress of her situation. Things happened when your body was under duress. Things could happen, and they could be innocent: your breasts could tenderize, your stomach could lose its sea legs, your cycle could upend itself, and you could ignore it all. Especially if you could believe that you had been careful with your calendar and believe that Baz had pulled out in time and believe that things like that didn’t happen to you.

A fourteen-year-old in Oleander, Kansas, couldn’t easily acquire condoms without everyone knowing exactly what she was about to do, and a fourteen-year-old could, under no circumstances, acquire a home pregnancy test without everyone knowing exactly what she had become. Without a license, she couldn’t drive to a town where no one knew her name.

She swiped a test from Gathers Drugs. She peed on the stick.

She locked herself in her room – a half storeroom, half office in which the deacon had shoved an air mattress and copies of
Prince
Charming
Is
Worth
the
Wait
and
Protecting
Your
Purity: God’s Handbook for the Christian Teen.
She stayed there for three days, and for three days, she fasted, and she cried. She dripped tears on the Bible, and found herself in Psalm 69: “When I weep and fast, I must endure scorn.”

Abortion was out of the question.

Abortion, she knew, from school and from church, was murder.

She didn’t know whether she believed that, or whether she believed Ms. Jacobs, the absurdly young gym teacher who’d been very fond of the word
choice,
as in “Abortion is a safe and valid
_
.”

It was not so in Oleander; it was not so for Ellie, who didn’t need the Internet to tell her that in a state with only one abortion provider and a parental-consent requirement, her choice was only: tell her mother she was having a baby, or wait for her mother to figure it out.

She was having a baby.

The deacon had told her that if she prayed, she would be saved.

He told her that if she accepted Jesus into her heart, she would be saved.

And so she prayed. Every morning and every night, every spare minute, on her knees, in church, in the bedroom that wasn’t her own, in the bathroom at school when no one was watching.
Please, Jesus. Make it go away.

The deacon said Jesus knew what was in her soul, and so He knew what it meant. He heard her prayer as it was intended:

Please, Jesus. Kill my baby.
 

And one day, the blood came, and with it a wrenching pain, and a loosening, and with a soft whimper and a flush of the toilet, she was saved.

The deacon knew only that she’d given herself to the Lord, and he doused her in holy water, and celebrated, and she was welcomed back into her home with open arms. She dedicated herself to her new life. She scrubbed her soul. But the deacon had lied. Because all the soup kitchens and all the food drives in the world couldn’t wash away the stain.

And now there was the voice, naming her sins.

Filthy.
 

Lustful.
 

Baby
killer.

It knew her as no one else did, so how could she not believe it?

“I don’t know if I can,” Ellie’s mother said as Ellie whimpered and screamed and begged her: “Please, no, Mommy, don’t.”

The deacon pressed the lighter into her hand. “You can, and you must. It’s only right it be you. Her mother should save her.”

Ellie’s mother turned the lighter slowly in her hands, seeming hypnotized by it. “She’s always made such a mess,” she told the deacon. “Children can’t help themselves, you know. Disgusting creatures.”

The deacon patted her shoulder. “This is why they need us. To teach them.”

“Yes,” she said. “This way she’ll learn.”

Ellie closed her eyes. It couldn’t be the last thing she saw: the deacon’s eyes, her mother’s smile. She closed her eyes, and the noise of the crowd dropped away, and she heard only the voice, except it was different now – no longer angry, no longer so gleefully knowing. It spoke not in her ears, but in her entire being, the words vibrating in her chest and head and heart. She knew it could be fear, or wishful thinking, or the drug, but it sounded like none of those. It sounded true.

You
have
always
been
clean,
it said.

You
have
always
been
saved.

She had time to hear her mother’s final goodbye – not
I love you,
not
I’m sorry,
but
It has to be.
She had time to wish that things had been otherwise, and she’d lived a different life. Or at least that she had lived this one with a friend. She found herself wishing, strangely, that Jule were by her side now, or Cassandra, or even the football player, Baz’s friend, the strange one she barely knew. She had time for the voice to tell her:

You
are
not
alone.

She believed that, too.

She had always believed less than people thought; she had believed less than she wanted to, though she had tried so hard. But she believed now. That He was here. That He was with her.

That she was good.

She took a deep breath, and believed that she was unstained and unbroken and deserved to live, and she had time to be happy before her mother’s hand lit the pyre, and the flames swallowed her up.