I couldn’t because in the trees below me I saw the beam of a Maglite go on and I heard footsteps in the snow and knew I could not go that way.
I stood huffing in the cold, sure that I couldn’t stay right out here in the open where I would be easy pickings. Elijah had the cover of the cabin, but his defensive position meant he wouldn’t be able to tell which side Roland was coming from.
I made for the woods on the other side, only stopping when I reached the edge of a ravine and slipped down behind a jack pine with a massive trunk. I didn’t have gloves on, so my hands and fingers stung rawly in the cold. My ribs ached, and the blood had slowed from my torn earlobe, congealing and hardening into a red mask I could feel covering my lower face and neck. I blew on my hands and squeezed them in my pockets. I was dizzy from the beating Elijah had given me, but not concussed. Cold and pain were the least of my problems. In the jacket pocket I found Maura’s agate and squeezed it for courage.
The crack of Mjolnir split the air.
“Don’t come any closer,” Elijah shouted from within his ruined cabin. “I don’t want to see anyone get hurt.”
“Eli,” Roland called, coming out from behind one of the trees. “Eli’s coming . . .” he said, singing the name out. “You need to come out of there. Easy like. Caroline has Sarah. You want your daughter back, you will cooperate.”
I couldn’t see what was happening from my vantage on the side of the cabin, so I pulled myself up by the rough bark of the trunk and crept along the border of the woods. Snow muffled my footsteps as I moved in a slow lope, my heart drumming in my ears.
“Well, then,” Elijah said. “It appears we have ourselves a classic standoff. Meshach is gone. He’s halfway to the farmhouse by now.”
“You mean Lucien Swenson? That’s his rightful name. His legal name. You come on out of there and I’ll tell you all about that little idiot. He’s not making it to any farmhouse. I sent Bjorn to cut off the back way.”
I could see Roland now, leaning against the trunk of a bare oak tree, his .45 held casually in his right hand, resting against his leg. I crouched behind another scruffy jack pine, snow sifting down when I leaned on the trunk. I thought I could hear someone moving through the woods behind me, snapping branches as he came. This was my chance to get away. Shivers coursed through my body, though I tried to remain still.
Elijah appeared in the doorway, looking down the barrel of Mjolnir. Roland straightened and brought his pistol up. “Drop the gun, Eli. Now. Or Sarah pays the price. Neither of us wants that.”
Elijah’s finger slipped inside the trigger guard as he exhaled heavily, the ghost of his breath rising around him, before his finger fell away. “Caroline wouldn’t do that, Roland. Mother wouldn’t allow it.” Yet he lowered his rifle and stepped from the cabin.
Roland kept his own pistol raised. “You’d be surprised what Mother will allow.”
“I want to talk to Mother,” Elijah said. “Promise me you’ll take me to her and I’ll do what you ask.”
Roland dipped his head. “First, you’re gonna have to show me some faith. You gotta drop your gun. You don’t get to hold on to it if you’re going to see Mother. The wire, too.”
Elijah took a step closer. He didn’t try to deny the wire. He lifted up his shirt and revealed what he’d shown me. The tape made a tearing sound as he peeled it away from his skin and tossed it into the snow between them. “What’d you do, Roland?”
“Just do what I say. Take off your shoulder strap and set it on the ground. Do it slow.” Roland stepped from the oak and approached, his .45 still raised. “Don’t you worry, now. This all might turn out right. You’re one of Mother’s favorites. The star preacher she picked to lead us into a new millennium.”
Elijah lifted the strap from his shoulder and carefully lowered Mjolnir to the ground. “What’d you do, Roland?” he said again.
“That last day she left here. I seen Maura pack a bag in the trunk of the car. I knew she was running. Mother Sophie can’t abide runners. Now, how long have you been wearing the wire?”
“Does it matter?” Elijah asked.
“You owe us that much. You owe us the truth. Mother Sophie will want to know.”
“And I will tell her myself. You said you’d take me to her. So you saw Maura put a bag in the trunk? What happened next?”
Roland cocked back the hammer of his pistol and gestured at the recorder Elijah had ditched. “First, I need you to crush that goddamn thing into dust.”
“It’s not even on,” Elijah said. “I knew I was going to have to deliver some punishment and didn’t think anyone needed to listen in on it.”
“Oh, I can understand not wanting ZOG to know what kind of man you are. A cuckold and an abuser. Now, do it!”
Elijah grimaced, but he still lifted his boot and stamped down, grinding the machine until it was fairly dismembered. I used the sound as cover so I could keep creeping forward, moving from tree to tree. They were only about twenty feet away now. When he was done, Elijah looked up at Roland, his fists clenched at his sides. I thought for a moment he might rush him. Roland didn’t waver with his .45. “How long have you been wearing it? And why?”
“I’ll tell you, but I have questions of my own. I started before Maura left. I didn’t want any part of your robbery plans. I wasn’t going back to jail. Never again.” He massaged his right fist, bruised by battering me, as he spoke. “I promised Maura. Soon as you started asking her about bank procedures and she got nervous.”
“So that means they have us on conspiracy to commit a crime. But no crime itself.”
“They were going to wait until your plans were definite and you made your move. They can put you away for much longer if they caught you in the act.”
I heard a twig break behind me in the woods. I figured it had to be Bjorn circling back. I twisted around looking for him, but I couldn’t see him or the bob of his flashlight.
“Goddamnit, Eli. You were like a son to me. And to Mother. Here we are almost to the end of the story. Almost to our Promised Land. And you have to go and fuck everything up. All because you’re afraid of a little jail time? The Eli I knew was a blood-and-soil man. He wasn’t afraid of anything.”
“Yeah. I’m not him anymore. I changed.”
“Changed how? You don’t believe?”
Barely perceptible, Elijah inched closer to Roland, both fists tucked at his side. “You know that little Jew who I beat so badly I thought I’d killed him? He came to see me. Visited me in jail to tell me I was forgiven. I’ve never been so ashamed. So, I believe in the Bible, just not the way you all have it twisted. There were months in prison when the Bible was all I read. The Word of God. And there’s not a single passage in there telling me to hate other people because of the color of their skin. I read it and I saw Jews not as enemies who killed Christ, but as brothers who share a common father in Abraham. I read it and I saw for the first time that I didn’t want any part of it anymore. I wanted to be done with Nazis and skinheads and all the other violent garbage we’ve surrounded ourselves with.” He dipped his head. “There. That enough of a confession for you?”
“Why didn’t you just go, then? Would’ve been better for all of us.” When Elijah took another small step, Roland waved the pistol at him. “Don’t come any closer.”
“Because you are my people. Because I thought I could share with you what I learned. Because, deep down, I was still afraid the world might end at Y2K and I wanted to be here with the only family I have left.” He swallowed. “What did you mean about Maura?”
I wondered about what he wasn’t saying. If he had cut a deal with the Feds for early release from prison. Roland was likely thinking the same.
“You always did like this patch of dirt, didn’t you? Setting yourself above us, high and mighty like. You can still have it. Caroline’s in love with you. She’s sick with it. She will be true to you in a way Maura never was. She will be a good mother to Sarah.”
Elijah spoke in a guttural growl. “She’s not Sarah’s mother.”
“Sarah’s mother is dead.”
Everything seemed to go still. I’d been creeping forward and was maybe only about ten feet away now. I didn’t dare come any closer. My vision blurred by drying blood over one eye, the men before me were specters in the twilight.
“Bullshit. She took the money and ran. Used your own plans against you.”
Roland shook his head slowly from side to side. “When I seen her pack that bag, I just knew.”
“You could’ve come to me. You should’ve. She was my wife.” Elijah’s voice broke.
“Figured you might be in on it. Like I said, you’d been acting different. So, I was waiting for the end of her shift out in the parking lot. Seen her get in the car with the college kid. It was dark, though, and the best glimpse I had of them was under the streetlamps. I couldn’t be sure who the young man was when he started showing up at Rose of Sharon. But I had suspicions.”
“What happened?” In the gap between words, Elijah took another small step. I mirrored his movements.
“It was an accident, Eli. Accidents happen.”
“Sure,” Elijah said, taking another step, weaving slightly to the side. “I know they do.”
“Stop right there. I got an itchy trigger finger. Mother Sophie still has uses for you. I’d like to bring you back without your head blown off. We can use you to feed false information to the Feds.”
Elijah lowered his head. “What happened?” he repeated.
“I followed them to the hospital, where he dropped her off. She waited until he drove away without going inside. Then she started walking up the street, likely heading for the bus stop. She didn’t see me coming, didn’t even flinch when my truck pulled up behind her and I came out the door. Only when she seen my face did she try to run.”
Roland’s hand shook as he kept the .45 trained on Elijah’s head.
“Go on,” Elijah said.
I knew I couldn’t get any closer without getting spotted. Hunched over, my hands in my pockets, I closed my fist around the agate, felt its solidity in my palm.
“I grabbed her and forced her into the back of the truck. But you know Maura. She didn’t go easy, lashing out with her legs and fists. She got me good a few times. She was hollering to wake the neighborhood. I tossed her in the back of the truck and gagged her with duct tape, her mouth first to stop her screaming. Then her legs and feet. I only meant to drive her back to you. Bring her home to The Land. Thought you could reason with her. But I had been hasty with that tape. Had to stop her screaming and when I put it on I must have blocked her nasal passages, too. I could hear her threshing in the back and just figured she was fighting, like a fish on the line. I didn’t realize . . . I didn’t know.”
When I saw Elijah tense, moving into a crouch, I rose from my hiding place and shouted “Hey!” as I hurled the stone. I didn’t have my full strength behind the throw, not with my hurt ribs, but it was enough of a distraction. Roland pivoted and fired in my direction before I could duck away. The bullet missed me, blasting into the pine trunk beside me, the bark exploding. Splinters of it pierced my face as I fell to the ground, blinded. What happened next I can’t say for sure. I heard Elijah roar as he bulled into Roland, heard the bone-crunch of his tackle, the hard grunt of fists punching into soft places, stealing breath. The incredibly loud boom of the pistol that ended the struggle.
I crouched, picking splinters from my forehead and face. They’d missed my eyes, fortunately, but I couldn’t see for the blood at first. Footsteps came toward me in the snow. Either my savior or killer approached.
“Come on,” urged Elijah’s breathless voice, “we can’t stay here.” When I wiped away a sheave of blood, I saw him before me, looming, Mjolnir looped around his shoulder, an angel of death. He reached a hand to help me up. “You see which way Bjorn went?”
I clasped his hand, the same hand that had beaten me savagely moments before and let him help me up. “He’s somewhere back there,” I said. “I thought I heard him behind me in the trees.”
“Okay,” he said. “We need to get you out of here before the rest come. They’ll have heard the shot down at the trailers. They’ll be coming.”
“What about you?”
His face was a shadow in the twilight, his eyes unreadable. “I can’t leave Sarah,” he said. “Neither could Maura. I think I knew all along that she hadn’t gotten away. I knew she wouldn’t leave us. She’s been here the whole time. I have to find out where. Mother will know where.”
I wiped away more blood and was about to say something, when a red laser swept out from behind the cabin wall. Bjorn had circled back the other direction. Since Elijah was facing me, he didn’t see it right away. The red light sliced through the trees before finding me in the space between. In the split second that I made to shout out a warning, I looked down and saw a red spot bloom in the center of my chest.
Elijah barked, “Get down!” and then I felt his body crash into mine. I heard the rapid crack-crack-crack of the assault rifle, bullets ripping past and tearing into flesh as we fell and fell through the air and his weight crushed me into the snow. He crashed down on top of me, punching the breath from my lungs. When I could breathe again beneath him, I called out softly.
“Eli?” He didn’t respond. “Get up!” I said. “He’s coming this way.” The salt of his blood, warm as tears, dropped from his face to mine. My hand cupped the back of his head, but where his skull should have been my fingers dipped into soft tissue, wet and unspeakable.
My gorge rose in my throat and I shoved him away from me, sliding out from under his corpse.
Mercifully, when I’d pushed him away he landed faceup in the snow, his wide-set eyes open and staring, glassy in death, that spark of intelligence snuffed out. As the red laser swept the area just above us, searching for me, I knelt by his body, my fingers brittle in the chill, and unclipped Mjolnir from the shoulder straps. From the trailers below I could see a host of Maglites coming up through the pines, at least a half dozen, likely led by the watcher in the tower. The men coming this way would be as heavily armed as Bjorn.
When Elijah had tackled me, he dropped us into a small depression out of sight. I shouldered Mjolnir and worked my way on my back to peer over the edge. From behind the other side of the cabin, the red eye of the laser swept out once more.
I looked at Bjorn through the sighting, my finger on the trigger. I took in two steadying breaths—in through my nose and out through my mouth. I could have taken his head off or shot him right through the throat, where that ugly iron cross crawled from his collar. I thought of those targets at the range, their silhouettes, and how easily I had pulled the trigger then. I drew a bead and fired four shots in quick succession, aiming not for Bjorn, but the cabin wall beside him, knowing the explosion of splinters might take him out. He screamed and fell away.
On a ridge below me, the Maglites fanned out, crazed beams dancing up in the pines as they dove for cover. I kept my sighting high and fired at regular intervals, aiming for the trees around them. The crack and thump of Mjolnir the only sound until I had emptied the high-capacity clip of all thirty bullets. Then I dropped the rifle and ran in a low crouch, slipping through the snow as I slid down another ridge and lay there, panting, the smell of gunpowder and blood thick in my nostrils.
I thought about which way to go. I had no way to make it past the men in the trees to my car in the lot below. If I tried directly for the farmhouse, they would suspect that, too.
Not faraway, I heard a call and echo. Someone cursed, a garbled cry as they must have found Roland’s body.
I waited, getting my breath back, not knowing which way to go.
“Here,” someone shouted nearby. “I see his tracks!”
I ran again as a beam of yellow light lit up the pines nearby. I ran hard and low and didn’t even see the drop-off. I was running one moment and then I was walking in midair before gravity took hold of me and I tumbled down a steep slope. I managed to get my hands out before I plunged right into an icy creek. I didn’t stop. Once I got my balance, I slipped into the rushing current, soaking my pant legs, and headed upstream, the way I figured they wouldn’t expect.
I heard them behind me as I made it around a bend. Maglites blazed in the pines as they closed in. Ahead of me part of the slope must have collapsed in a flood, toppling an immense oak tree that had fallen across the gulley, leaving gnarled roots exposed. Wolf tree, I thought, delirious with fear and pain, old growth. The mass of twisting roots made a doorway. Without looking behind me, I scrambled up and heaved myself inside, ignoring the scraping fingers of the roots that shredded my clothes and skin. I squeezed my way into a hollow space within the heart of the tree.
Here, I curled up, drawing my knees to my chest. Melting water rushed underneath, the icy flow of the current washing past, I clasped my wet jeans, and curled in like a fetus.
Voices called outside. I held my breath as one of the Maglites peered into the root cave, blinding me. The light found me and pierced me. I was a dead man. “Must have gone the other way,” the voice said. A young voice, no older than a teenager.
The light pulled away. I stayed huddled in the dark. I couldn’t run anymore, even if I had wanted. My adrenaline spent, I felt so bone-weary and cold that I could have slept for days.
They splashed off in search of me downstream.
The lights didn’t come back. They were gone. Yet, I remained within the tree. Even the pain of my torn earlobe and bruised ribs felt far from me, a pain that belonged to someone else. While my boots were waterproof, my pants had been soaked up to the knees. I shivered but didn’t even feel the cold. Instead a strange warmth surrounded me, embryonic, and I listened to the ebb and flow of the creek, wondering dimly if I was in shock, while the tree held me as a mother holds a child. As Yggdrasil must have held the children at the end of the world. Don’t sleep, a part of my brain warned. If you sleep you will never leave this place. I wondered if hypothermia was already settling in.
Maura, oh Maura, you almost got away, didn’t you?
The agate had been the only gift she had given me, polished and dark at first glance, but lit with many colors when you studied it. Now all I had left was the handwritten note she gave me along with it. I knew the words by heart. Huddled in the wolf tree, I pictured her elegant handwriting and the words she had set down.
Lucien,
I know we have spoken about how I wanted to study geology if I’d been allowed to finish my degree, but still you must think this agate an odd gift. It’s the bad children who end up with coal in their stockings at Christmas, right? But if you study the stone you will see a rainbow of colors. It’s a darkness lit with many colors.
I need to explain. In the Book of Genesis it says that the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God brooded over the face of the waters. That’s the only creation story I will be allowed to tell my daughter, Sarah, according to the official homeschooling curriculum from Christian Liberty Press. You want to know a heresy that would get me banned from my church? I believe your professor is in the right of it. How long did God brood? A single heartbeat? A billion years? Time is a human construct and doesn’t really exist. It allows us to measure day and night and try to make sense of it. But if God exists, then God must be beyond time.
Hmm . . . see how I can be philosophical, too? I promise you, one day I will go back to school.
You must wonder where I’m going with all of this. The stone you hold. Maybe thousands and thousands of years ago the lava compressed quartz to make it. Long, long ago. Down in the darkness, the earth created this light, these colors. It’s a stone that holds fire. Just as each of us are made from carbon, the dust of stars. The passage of millions of years to make this stone are a greater miracle than if God magicked it from the thin air.
When you hold this agate, you hold my heart in your hands. I give it to you freely. When you hold the stone, remember me. Like this stone in each of us there is also a darkness that sometimes presses upon us. My prayer for you is that in that place deep down inside, you learn how to make light.
—Maura
As love letters went, hers was dissatisfying, but each time I read it I also felt a deepening of mystery. She was saying goodbye in the note. She knew our relationship couldn’t last. She knew the darkness was going to press down on us both.
I might have fallen asleep because the next I knew Maura was there in the hollow with me. The sandalwood scent of her, the brush of her long hair as she bent over me, her voice whisper-singing a hymn in a tongue that time had forgotten. How I loved you, Maura.
I reached for her in turn.
But her hands were not soft when they found me. Her fingernails, coils of horned bone, scraping, her hair white, sallow skin rotting and peeling away from her cheekbones. She smelled of ashes and rot as she reached for me, grabbing hold of my torn earlobe. “Wake up!” she hissed. “You have to get out of here!”
I lurched, lashing out with my feet, hands threshing and tangling in the roots. There was no one here, just the tendrils of roots and the warm dark of a dead tree and the teeth-chattering cold that returned with my waking. I had to move.
I pushed past the twisted-root doorway and dropped down into the stream. I didn’t even pause to look for the lights. How long had I been out? I didn’t know. I couldn’t go back to the trailers. I didn’t know the way. Numbly, I followed the creek to its source where it spilled out from a crevice in the hill. I kept going, up a slope of granite scree, until I could see the dark valley spreading below the trees. I cut down the slope, keeping well away from the cabin where Elijah and Roland had been killed. I could no longer feel my feet, my tread heavy, every step an agony. I only wanted to curl up in the snow and sleep. I willed myself to keep going.
I don’t know how long I walked, but eventually I made it down to the main road leading to The Land. I kept to the treeline, trudging, my thoughts empty. If I tried to think, the terrible memory of Elijah’s death came back to me. At one point I heard tires crunching over the gravel behind me and instinctively I threw myself down in the brush. A pickup rolled past, its headlights off, and in the bed of the truck I saw the cherry flare of a cigarette and heard a low murmur of voices before they were gone. They were still out here, hunting me.
I forced my stiff limbs to get up and kept limping along the road, stopping now and then to listen. I passed the first farm I came upon in case they were watching it and kept going. To walk up any of these quarter-mile-long driveways would leave me exposed. The first gray fingers of dawn spread along the horizon. A crow cawed from a pine and flitted off into the woods. I followed it, cutting through a grove of bare apple trees, which gave way to a fenced meadow and then an L-shaped farmhouse. I hobbled across the meadow. The kitchen light was on, a gray-haired woman in a blue nightgown rinsing something in the sink.
I knocked at the back door, which had a small glass window. A dog snarled from within the house and the kitchen light went dark. I was too numb with shock and desperation to wonder what it must have felt like to have someone knocking at your back door in the early morning light, or if she glimpsed the horror of my face through the window, the mask of dry blood around my eyes and mouth, and what she must have thought when she saw me. I knocked again, my fists numb against the wood.
The pale oval of the woman’s face appeared. She blinded me when she turned on the porch light. “I have a gun,” she said in a shaking voice, “and I will not hesitate to use it if you try to get in this house.”
“Please,” I said. “You have to help me.”