Freedom's Child (32 page)

My name is Freedom and the heaviness of my skirt and robe slows me down. Men in construction trill their tools in the corners of my earshot as I shuffle into the dense forest, whipped by twigs, the scent of soil kind through my nostrils. Despite my lack of sense of direction, I aim for the protesters; I rip through the branches that catch the cotton like claws reaching out to stop me in my tracks. I rip, I roar, I bleed, but the pain only drives me faster.

In some way, I can feel it in my blood: the sense that I’m going in the right direction, the sense that I’m heading toward the clamshell roads that carry the crazies. But I’m slow, I’m out of shape. I wipe the snot with my sewn-on gloves. And I hear Magdalene trailing behind, but I pretend not to notice. I suppose it’s better that she follows me than is at home with the fucking psychos.

“Sister Freedom, we’re supposed to be washing floors! Why are we running through the forest?!” she squeals.

I see the black gates; I see the signs hung on them through the trees. Protesters’ voices take shape the closer I get, their chants transforming from a thick purr into glass-like comprehension. “Stay where you are,” I yell back to Magdalene, unsure of whether or not she hears me. I finally reach the gates. In a gesture of desperation, I pull myself up and stand on the lowest bar.

“You have to get us the fuck out of here,” I plead with the activists. “You need to go get help!” But my words seem to drown in their clamor. “Will you fucking listen to me, for fuck’s sake! Listen to me!”

I spit out words, words in no particular order: words like
Mass, Suicide, ATF, Fucking psychos
. And these are all attention-grabbing words. Yet their attention is elsewhere, settled somewhere between false gods and vehement indoctrination. The louder I get, the louder they become. I scream until my ribs ache and the walls of my throat might bleed.

And from the back, of fucking course, the short butch who egged me the day before makes her way to the front of the crowd. I reach through the gates and stare directly into her swollen eyes. “You need to get the ATF. There’s about to be four hundred fifty corpses behind these walls.” The woman seems to listen to me. Her shoulders rock from side to side as she walks to me at the gates. My heart rate drops down to a steadier pace when she shows signs of concern, when she listens. “You have to get help. There are children in here, for God’s sake.”

But her compassionate expression becomes a twist of the lips, there’s a strange glimmer in her black eyes, and she pelts me with a hard-boiled egg. I just manage to catch her by the fringe of her hood and pull her back to the gates. I grab her, double-fisted, pushing the gates with my heels. With her back to me, I wrap my arm around her throat and squeeze with every drop of panic that swims through my muscles. I scream in her ear, “Their blood will be on your hands, then. Their blood will be on your hands!”

Then the strong arms of another around my own throat. I release the butch when I’m twisted around like a rag doll, a tornado of heavy cotton being pulled in a headlock back toward the compound. It’s Reverend Virgil Paul, his pace faster than my thoughts. I cannot see Magdalene, but I hear her, her pleas for her father not to hurt me.

“Get on back home to your mother,” he yells out to her. On the way out of the forest, the workers and residents stare, eyes cold and
distant, lifeless marbles peering from blankets of cloth. The only sign of life, their breath in the cold front that sweeps over this place, this fucking place.

Ahead is the shed. That’s where we’re going. The people, the scenery, it all seems to disappear, fade away from me. It’s only Virgil and I. The Dutch door slams behind us, the noise turning my spinal fluid into ice water. He grabs me by my hair, and in one effortless heave, I’m thrown to the floor. I remember the gun, still in the back of my skirt. I need to find out where Rebekah is.

He grabs a five-pound bag of uncooked rice and pours it around me on the floor. I try my best to keep facing toward him so he won’t spot the gun.

“Kneel,” he demands. “Kneel on the rice.” It’s uncomfortable at first, but I obey without one word. He kicks me, right in the kidney, enough that it takes the wind out of me. I’m sure to piss blood later on. The pain shoots up to my armpit, I can’t make a sound through it. “For your iniquities, you do not deserve this Day of Freedom.”

“You’re a fucking murderer! This Day of Freedom is a lie. It’s a mass suicide!”

He punches me in the face; I swear I hear my skull split in half. I taste blood almost immediately. Virgil seems to regain his composure, leaning down to face me. “Who are you, Freedom? Who are you really?” I hear his bones grind, I smell his sweat above me.

“I’m a fucking ATF agent.” I’m not sure why this is the first thing to come out of my mouth—one of my most outlandish lies. But he doesn’t gamble with it.

“ATF, huh?”

I grin, a mouthful of blood. “So you can forget your plans to kill me. They all know I’m here. And there’s no way you’ll get away with this horror.” The rice begins to burn the skin of my knees.

From a standing faucet in the corner of the shed, Virgil fills two buckets with water. “I’m not going to kill you, Freedom. Because I’m not the murderer you think I am.” His voice is alarmingly calm.
He places the handle of each bucket in one of my hands and makes me hold my arms up. He takes what looks like a broom handle and straps it on my shoulders, threading each end through the bucket handles. I am reminded of Christ’s Crucifixion, carrying the weight of the world. The grains of rice start to feel like glass, and my knees bleed under the weight of the water. But I don’t whine. I don’t groan. I refuse to give this guy the satisfaction he so desires. “But you will stay in here. And you will listen to those around you ascend to heaven. And you will live the rest of your life with their blood on
your
hands.”

The pain makes me impulsive. “Where is Rebekah?”

“Is that why you’re here? Over her disappearance?”

“What does it matter if you tell me the truth now?”

“I loved Rebekah. What makes you think I had anything to do with her disappearance?”

“We know she was running guns for Third-Day Adventists.”

His words become hisses. “Rebekah was the last one of this congregation to make me angry, to turn her back on this church.” He walks around me. “So I’d choose my words wisely.”

“Or what?”

Virgil gazes out the window. “What happened to Rebekah should be of no concern to you.” He opens the top of the Dutch door and calls out to one of the nearby workers, demanding he fetch the Amalekite. “It had nothing to do with the guns.”

“Just tell me where she is,” I scream.

The Amalekite arrives with the other worker, head down, cotton dirty. “Stay here with the infidel,” Virgil instructs them. The man with us is a thin one who looks like the offspring of a Holocaust victim and a scarecrow.

“Answer me, Virgil! Where the hell is she?”

He doesn’t say anything at first. He just stares at me with cold, hard eyes. I’m shaking with rage. He leans down, close enough that I can feel his breath. “Which part?”

The blood rises up my neck to my bleeding face. I think I break a few teeth with my own jaw. The buckets of water shake with my hands, my body breaking under the weight, along with my heart. I want to chase the man down as he leaves; I want to rip him open with my bare hands. We listen to him lock the only door of the shed from the outside.

“Amalekite.” It’s hard to breathe. “Amalekite, you have to help me. You have to help me before it’s too late.” Her head doesn’t move. She narrows her eyes toward the scarecrow. “You can’t let this happen. You can’t let all these people die like this!”

“We have a higher purpose,” says Scarecrow. “We’re gonna ascend to the thrones of the Lord.”

“God’s purpose has nothing to do with mass suicide, can’t you see that?” The rice digs into my kneecaps. “What God wants this? You’re not worshiping God, you’re worshiping a monster who doesn’t give two flying fucks about you!” The scarecrow scuffs his toes on the wood floor. I direct my attention to the Amalekite. “You can’t let them hurt Magdalene. I know how much she means to you, I see it every time you look at her.” There’s sorrow in her eyes, the kind that begs to speak, the kind that’s afraid to speak.

Suddenly, the sounds of a siren blaring through the compound. Everyone holds their breath. Everyone freezes. Everyone swallows their fear.

“What the hell is that?” I ask the Amalekite.

“The Day of Freedom has arrived.”

I drop the buckets. I pull the grains of rice from my skin. I grab the Amalekite by the shoulders. But Scarecrow gets brave; he gets too brave for his own good. He tries to stop me.
Really? Your 140 pounds against a mother hearing the news of her daughter’s death? I don’t think so, buddy
. I’m insatiable, unstoppable, and I have this insane lust for violence right now.

I grab my empty pistol from behind me and whack the scarecrow on the side of the head with all the rage I have in me, every cell
of this bag of blood you’d call a body. He falls to the ground, unconscious.
Consider it a favor, kid
.

“Do you know where they store the ammo?” I ask as I creep to the window. Outside, the people in white scatter home; they call out to one another. My rage turns to vitality. Hurt turns to ambition. It all turns into vengeance.

“I know who you are.” Her pronouncement cuts through the air like a dull butter knife on dry meat. “She looked just like you.”

“He’s not going to get away with this.”

“We’re never going to make it out of here alive.”

“Ye of little faith.” I look around for a way out. “I just need the ammo.”

“I know where it is.”

“How much time do we have?” I ask.

“A matter of minutes.”

I don’t have a plan. I don’t know where to start. There is no time to think. There is only just enough time to react. I find a spare pile of clothes in the shed, letting the bloody ones fall to the floor. The windows are painted shut, but no one seems to be paying attention from the outside. I wrap the soiled clothes around my fist and break the window opposite the church. I climb out, using my foot to kick the remaining shards from the pane. I help the Amalekite out after me.

“How fast can you get it?” I ask.

“It’s up in Rebekah’s room. Under her bed.”

“Where will the Pauls be?”

“In the church,” the Amalekite says. “They will all be there for the Day of Freedom.”

“Shit.”
React, Freedom. React
. “I’ll get the ammo. I’ll meet you back here.”

Mason and Peter take the tea that one of the ATF agents brings back from the Circle K. With the draperies of the cabin motel room drawn and the cloudy weather, it feels later than it is. Without asking, Mason reaches down to Peter’s leg and pulls the flask from his sock. A shot in each one of their paper cups. “Bourbon’s my poison of choice too,” says Mason.

“You definitely have the Delaney blood in you.”

“I shudder to think.” Mason walks over to the radios that came from the Redindelly’s eighteen-wheeler, the contents of which are now stationed in the one-room cabin only two minutes from the Paul farm. Closed-circuit screens show shots of different areas of the farm from the gates, but nothing beyond them. With the exception of the protesters huddling around the south end of the gate for reasons beyond the camera’s vantage point nearly an hour ago, there hadn’t been any movement on those screens since Freedom arrived. He stands shoulder to shoulder with the bald skinhead he met in the truck. “No word from the wire yet?”

“Not since she was with the Amalekite getting undressed yesterday.”

Mason swallows hard. “How much longer are we going to have
to wait until we do something?” He takes a quick sip of the tea. “I don’t know how much more of this I can stand.”

“We’re not going to jeopardize this case because you’re having mommy issues,” says the skinhead, without taking his eyes off the screens. “So just chill out and take a seat. Let us big boys do the work.”

Mason rolls his eyes and walks back toward Peter, muttering the word “asshole” under his breath. He sits at the foot of the bed next to Peter when Joe pours another shot into Mason’s mug for him. “Tell me about Rebekah,” Mason says as he rubs his brow. “I’ve missed her. And I feel like I know absolutely nothing about her, given what I’ve just learned about her in recent days.”

“She is kind.” Joe moans as he slides his back against the wall and sits. “She would come in, every Sunday, like clockwork. She’d come in with her father’s cash, by the hundreds, used to take the bus in.”

Mason tries to imagine his sister on a bus.

“The guys would strap the guns to her, duct tape around the legs. It was easy. There’s no security with the Greyhound buses, and the clothes from her church covered all of them. Hell, on a good day, we could strap her with up to sixteen at a time. Then she’d take the bus right back to Goshen.” Joe looks over and sees in Mason’s face that these aren’t the kinds of things he wanted to know. He shifts the subject. “Her favorite food was biscuits ’n gravy.” Joe stares off. “Before business, the kid always asked for biscuits ’n gravy and a Pepsi.”

Necks turn, headphones land on the shoulders. “What the fuck is that?” says Peter.

The room freezes until one of the agents starts yelling into a radio, “We’re going in, we have to go in now.”

Mason runs outside and looks toward the direction of his family’s home where the sirens come from. And suddenly it clicks. He turns back in and grabs the skinhead by the shirt. “You told me domestic terrorism, you sonuvabitch!” he screams in his face.
“They’re about to kill themselves, aren’t they? They’re planning a fucking suicide. Tell me! Tell me, goddamn it!”

The skinhead’s at a loss for words. The color of Joe’s face goes white, his jaw dropping to the floor.

“Joe, we got something!” yells one of the agents by the radios. While the rest of them call for backup and storm out of the cabin, Joe turns up the radio.

On the other end: “Is there anybody there?” The voice comes from the wire they hooked onto Freedom. But the voice doesn’t belong to her. “There are children in here, you have to get us out. Please, God. Somebody help us!”

As Mason and Peter go to follow the ATF team, Mason stops at the last second when he spots movement on one of the surveillance cameras: on it, three men scale the gates and break into the church of the Third-Day Adventists.