Escape from Eden (26 page)

“Really?” he said. “You simply woke up in the jungle, lost and confused?”

I nodded, hands still over my face. He didn’t believe me. Tears began welling in my eyes. I wiped them away with my fingertips and looked down at my shoes, then eyed the door.

“Mia, you have caused many issues over the last few weeks.”

“I know.” I met his stern glare. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you? I’m surprised. You never showed any real remorse before.”

“I’ve never been alone on the outside before. Never been so afraid and alone. Edenton is my home, Thaddeus.”

He stared at me for long moments through squinted lids. I stared back. Strands of hair dangled over my eyes, and with every beat of my heart I saw them tremble.

His hand reached for the phone, arm stretching across the desk, not losing eye contact with me. “Gladstone,” he said. “I have an emergency.”

By the time Doc Gladstone came to collect me from Thaddeus’s office, I’d been thoroughly frozen through, both by the air conditioning and by Thaddeus’s icy demeanor. He hadn’t said a word to me after my bawling confession and I was too afraid to elaborate on my story. He handed me off to Doc Gladstone as if I were nothing more than a dirty bag of laundry to be cleaned and pressed.

“Take care of this,” Thaddeus said to Doc Gladstone. “Use whatever meds you need to put her mind at ease.” He pinned me with a hard stare.

A pit of dread settled in my stomach. I didn’t like how that sounded.

Doc Gladstone gave me a warm smile after Thaddeus shut the door. “We can talk once we get to the infirmary, but first we need to get you there without anyone seeing you like this.”

“But how?” I asked. We were still inside the gates of the Reverend’s protected village, but the infirmary was located close to the center of Edenton.

“We’ll take the tunnels,” Doc Gladstone said.

“Tunnels?”

Doc Gladstone led me back down the path I’d followed to Thaddeus’s cottage, to where the Jeep was still parked inside the wood-and-wire gate.

“Here,” he said.

We stood before the little concrete building I’d seen before. He pressed the numbers 123456. After he punched the numbers into a keypad above the door handle, it beeped and swung open. A light blinked on. Inside a set of stairs led down two levels. The concrete was clean, untouched by the quick decay of the jungle surrounding the building.

“Where are we?” I asked.

Doc Gladstone sighed, as if he didn’t approve of where we were. “Beneath Edenton is a series of tunnels, built when the water and sewer systems were put in place.”

“What are they used for?”

“Getting around the encampment undetected,” he said as he descended the stairs. “This is something the Flock knows nothing about, Mia. And I trust you can keep quiet about this.”

“You have my word,” I said, showing Doc Gladstone the respect he’d earned from me over the years.

The tunnel snaked along, lit intermittently by caged lightbulbs along the ceiling. It smelled dank, like the basement of the house where I lived when I was young. Every thirty feet or so the tunnel forked, with no sign or indication where the other branch led that I could see.

“How do you know where you’re going?” I asked Doc Gladstone. My voice echoed off the concrete walls.

He pointed to a series of small circles on the wall, spaced the same distance away from each other as the lights shining above. Each circle was divided into four sections, the upper left section filled with blue, the other three left blank. “This tunnel is leading northwest, toward the northwest section of Edenton, where the infirmary is located. If the tunnel were leading directly north, then the line at the top of the circle, pointing north, would be colored blue. If it were leading southeast, then the lower right section would be colored in, and so forth.” He pointed to the wall on the other side of the tunnel. “The symbols are reversed there, so if you were coming the opposite way, you’d be traveling southeast. Keep to the right to know which direction you’re traveling.”

“Why not simply have signs saying where each tunnel is going?”

“If necessity is the mother of invention, paranoia is the father.”

Finally, we made it to another set of stairs. The metal handrail chilled the skin of my palm. When Doc Gladstone opened the door at the top, we emerged through a closet in the infirmary, the smell of alcohol and adhesive permeating the air.

“Take one of the exam tables,” he said as he gathered some supplies from a cabinet.

The weight of my nervousness made it difficult to walk without wobbling a little. Trying to get my breathing under control, I sat at the edge of one of the tables, feet dangling. To my right, within arm’s reach, a series of instruments lay neatly on a tray. One with a long handle and a short blade looked very sharp.

“So,” he said, approaching me. “Let’s take a look at the cuts on your legs before we address the state of your mind, shall we?”

My legs. I’d forgotten. Ibbie had removed the bandages, but surely he’d noticed the cuts and scrapes were cleaned, most healing properly. If I’d awakened in the jungle, like I’d claimed, infection would have set in by now.

“You know, they’re fine,” I said, tucking one leg under myself. “I washed them off with some river water.”

Doc Gladstone’s eyes rounded in surprise. “River water?” Before I could pull the other away, he knelt down and grabbed my calf, examining the scabbing skin. “River water could not clean the cuts so neatly, Mia.” His eyes flicked up to mine. “But it is good to see that Ibbie hasn’t lost her touch.”

“I’ve been working with the outside network for months now,” Doc Gladstone said quietly. He stood then, glancing about the infirmary. The silence in the room cocooned us in an eerie but explicit kind of privacy.

“You know what happened with us?” I asked. “At Las Casitas? On the mountain?”

He nodded. “I was sent to Las Casitas that night to help anyone wounded in the fire.” He cocked a little grin. “But there were none. Only hysterical wealthy folks worried about their possessions. Thaddeus told me you, Gabriel, and Juanita had run. Veronica sent me a message yesterday. I knew to expect you back.”

“But how could she send you a message?”

Doc Gladstone walked to a large bookshelf tucked into the corner of the room. He drew his finger over one row of slender books with white spines.

“Because I’m not allowed access to medical journals online, they’re delivered in print weekly. All items that come into Edenton are scanned by an X-ray machine, so the network sends messages inside the journals as footnotes.” He smiled faintly. “No one reads footnotes.”

My mouth hung open in shock. “I’m having trouble comprehending this,” I said. “I mean, I get it. You’re helping the network—”

“I’m part of the network.”

“But—why are you doing this? You’re here in Edenton, aren’t you? You came here for a reason.”

“When I came here I believed in what the Reverend had to offer. A self-governing, utopian society, bound by respect and love. The Reverend was idealistic and hopeful, but began to change as the idea of Edenton as a self-sufficient community began to falter. Funds dwindled and the jungle began to conspire against us in its inherent ways. The Reverend brought in Thaddeus to help manage and grow Edenton.

“The encampment itself began to transform—buildings were renovated, expensive equipment was added to the kitchen, to the infirmary, to the security of the grounds. The guards began to patrol. I’d never seen a gun until the Edenton sentinel was assembled. The Reverend shut himself off from the Flock within his own secured zone. What was once a transparent council of leadership became a cloistered ministry of secrets. During that time, Thaddeus never left the Reverend’s side. He counseled him on everything, from what he ate to the content of his sermons. The Reverend grew more obsessed with power, taking Edenton to the next level. And, as this happened, I was contacted by the network.”

“Aren’t you afraid of getting caught?”

“I’m afraid every day.” Doc Gladstone rolled a stool over to sit beside me. “I took an oath, and part of that oath states that I remain a member of society with special obligations to all my fellow human beings. Edenton is a society, Mia, regardless of how it’s changed. And what is happening here, how the Reverend is exploiting these people, must be stopped. Until now I’ve been at this alone on the inside.”

With a surprising feeling of dread, I realized he now had me to help, to figure out how to save the Flock. Just me.

“Do you know about the Reverend’s threat against the Flock?” I asked. “How he’s planning to kill everyone if there is an attack on Edenton?”

“I do.” He rubbed his palm on his forehead, then down the back of his dreadlocks. “But the Reverend, Thaddeus, and the rest of the ministry know my passion for healing. Anytime I get close to finding out the Reverend’s plan to thwart rescue attempts by the outside, I’m shut out.”

Passion for healing.

“So, Juanita? Is Juanita alive?” I asked.

“They haven’t told me where she is. All they told me is to expect her return soon.”

“Will she live?”

“They didn’t tell me.” He looked at me with sorrow in his eyes.

I rubbed my temple with my index finger, trying to focus and not worry about Juanita. “What was the rest of Edenton told?” I asked. “About what happened to us?”

“At morning prayer yesterday, the Reverend told the congregation that you were on a special undertaking for the Flock with the poorer communities outside of San Sebastian. He asked for prayers for your success, and left it at that.”

I thought of Mama, of Max, of Juanita’s mother. No one left Edenton, except for Doc Gladstone to go to the hospital in San Sebastian and a few others to go into the city for supplies. They must have suspected something was wrong. Or were they too far under the Reverend’s spell to question our whereabouts?

I needed to find a way to let Gabriel’s parents know he was all right. Stubborn as hell, determined to move on from Edenton, but all right. Or was it my place to do so? If Gabriel didn’t care whether his parents died by the hands of the Reverend, would he care if they knew about how he was doing? That, somehow, he would be okay?

Doc Gladstone sat hunched over on the stool, eyes half-closed with a haggard kind of tiredness.

“What do we do now?” I asked him.

He exhaled and glanced at a cabinet. “Once you get changed into your uniform, I’ll need to give you a shot.” He gave me an apologetic look.

“What is the shot for?” I asked.

“Thaddeus is going to debrief you. The drug I should give you would make you very open to suggestion, make insinuations memories, so you can return into Edenton with a clear mind and an open heart.”

“Should give me?” I asked, feeling anger rise in me. “You’ve been giving these drugs to the Flock all along? How could you do that to these people you claim to love?”

“Either I give them the drugs, or they die for what they remember.” He shook his head sadly. “Death or the drugs. The choice was simple for me, Mia. Now, we must take care of you.”

“I can’t let you do that,” I said, eyeing the scalpel on the tray next to me.

“I know.” The corner of his mouth kicked up. “And I wouldn’t do it to you. Not now that you’re going to help the network.”

“The network. Sounds so official.”

“In a way, it is. We have very significant people trying to help the cause. And you, Mia, are our linchpin.”

“I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”

“Well, first things first. We need to prep you for a debriefing by Thaddeus.”

A tremble started in my limbs. “Do you mean he’s going to interview me?”

“In a way. He’ll suggest to you how you ended up back in Edenton, what happened the night of the Prayer Circle, where you were during that time, understand?”

I nodded. “Does the real drug work?”

“Does it work? No one has ever told us it hasn’t because if they did, if they remembered what happened at Las Casitas and discussed it—questioned it–they would be punished. And everyone fears punishment.”

“Punishment? Like Contrition? Heavy labor?” I asked, recalling Gabriel’s penance in the heap.

Doc Gladstone filled a syringe with a clear liquid, flicked it once, and gingerly placed it on the tray next to me. “The Reverend is not a forgiving man, regardless of the teachings of the Lord’s scripture.” He sat back down and folded his arms. “In Ecclesiastes, it is claimed that lack of punishment leads people into evil. The Reverend uses the Bible’s lessons in penance as models for torture. Days of hard labor, like on the heap, is one thing. Slicing a man’s legs and arms, then packing him in salt to suffer stinging pain is quite another.” At my look of horror he added, “A twisted translation of Lot’s wife’s punishment. Now go clean yourself up. You’ll find a uniform dress in the bathroom. And hurry, Thaddeus will be here any moment.”

I undressed and swiftly removed the tiny microphones from my bra. Then I quickly showered and changed into the uniform laid out on the counter by the sink. I took a tiny microphone, removed it from its small plastic case, and slipped it into the pocket of my dress. The other microphones went back into the clean sports bra I usually wore. By the time I’d returned to the exam room, Thaddeus stood by Doc Gladstone’s bookshelf, skimming the titles on the spines as Doc Gladstone looked on nervously.

“So much to study up on, eh Gladstone?” Thaddeus said.

“Yes, must keep current. Perhaps if I could use a computer to access the medical journals there would be no need to kill so many trees.”

Thaddeus tsked. “Have you looked around? There’s an abundance of trees. We drown in them every day. We spend so much on manpower to keep them from encroaching upon Edenton–” His eyes snapped up and saw me standing in the doorway, neatly dressed in my Edenton uniform. “Mia.”

“Thaddeus,” I said, nodding once. I took my place on an exam table.

“Much calmer now, are you?” he asked me but looked at Doc Gladstone.

Doc Gladstone shook his head, indicating he hadn’t given me the drug. The syringe alone lay on the tray; the sharp instruments that had been lined up alongside it were gone. Perhaps Doc Gladstone worried I’d do something rash to Thaddeus. He wasn’t wrong to worry.