The Outside (31 page)

But there were too many of them. The carpenter, still bleeding from his wound, ripped a loose brick from the foundation of the building and hurled it at me. I tried to duck, but it slammed into the side of my head. I landed on the ground, dazed, tasting dirt and snow and blood.

A shoe pummeled my ribs. I felt something crack. I reached for a stake and thrust it into the leg of my attacker. He howled and leaped back, but the others swarmed me.

If they couldn’t eat me, they were determined to crush me.

I glanced up at the sky, feeling the music in the back of my skull and the blood pounding in it. I felt bright pain . . .

. . . and saw bright light.

A burning blue-white light washed over the land. I blinked against it, unable to see anything. There were men shouting, gunshots.

I felt cold, glowing hands around my face. I looked up into Alex’s phosphorescent eyes.

“Damn it, Bonnet. You are the most frustrating woman on earth!”

I closed my eyes and fell into darkness.

***

I awoke in sunshine.

And I hurt. My head pounded, my ribs throbbed, and I felt as if I were covered by a single large bruise. I focused on the sharp pain that came with each inhalation, staring up at the ceiling.

It was a familiar ceiling. I recognized the slant and light of my girlhood bedroom. I turned my head, taking in the plain closet doors, the chest of drawers with no mirror, and my sister’s bed across from mine. My hands smoothed the worn surface of the quilt pressed over my chest.

I was home. The place I most wanted to be. My vision blurred with tears of joy.

“Hi, Bonnet.”

Alex sat in a rocking chair beside me, Fenrir and a heap of golden retriever at his feet. His fingers were interlaced in mine. I scarcely noticed him over the racket of the pain in my chest.

“Hi.” My voice sounded weak and tinny. I began to form questions with my mouth, but my lungs wouldn’t cooperate.

“Don’t try to talk,” he said soothingly. He poured water from a pitcher into a glass and pressed it to my lips. I drank a few sips, the liquid cold in my throat and tasting like familiar iron.

“You got hurt pretty bad,” he said. “Broken rib, they think. Bruised lung. The medic sewed up your head.”

I reached up to my scalp. I felt stubble and the prickle of stitches. I felt a pang of vague panic. I had been growing my hair since I was a child. Plain women didn’t cut their hair.

My hand fell. It didn’t matter. A dog tongue licked my palm.

“Frau Gerlach’s been feeding you some nasty-smelling tea. She says it’ll help you heal.”

I swallowed, whispered: “The people from the Singing . . .”

“They’re all right.” He stared hard at me. “I couldn’t sleep without you. So I got up in the middle of the night, then saw that you were gone. But you’d left tracks in the snow.”

My face flamed. I felt ashamed that I hadn’t been honest with Alex, hadn’t tried to share what I felt, what I sought. Though we were different, there was no reason that he couldn’t have respected or understood my feelings.

“I got the Hexenmeister and Elijah up. I thought that the vampires had glamoured you . . . taken you away.” He shook his head. “Elijah went to get the soldiers. Fenrir could find your tracks in the snow . . . and we saw you at the school- house, whaling away on those vamps.”

“Did they get away?” I hissed.

“Nope. Soldiers chased them down. Elijah actually did pretty good with the fighting thing, too. But the kids in the schoolhouse wouldn’t let anyone in. Not until dawn.”

I cracked a smile. That hurt, so I stopped. I stared at the ceiling. “But we’re still under the
Bann
. . .” I didn’t understand how we were here. Home.

“You’ve been out for a few days, Bonnet. There was something of a town meeting. The Hexenmeister got pissed as hell. As near as I can tell, the Elders got voted down.”

I drew my eyebrows together. I didn’t understand how that could happen.

“The Bishop got . . . I dunno what you guys would call it, but he got defrocked. The community voted to keep lodging the soldiers and to lift the
Bann
.”

I blinked back tears. In the sunshine, they shimmered.

A small knock rattled at the door. I turned my head to see Sarah rushing in, holding her doll. She pounced on my bed, causing my head to thud.

“Katie.” She snuggled close, beneath my arm, slapping her rag doll down on my belly. “They said you fought the Darkness off. All by yourself.”

“Not by myself,” I croaked. “With a lot of other people. And God.”

I looked past her, at my parents in the doorway. My mother came to kneel beside my bed, kissed my forehead.

“Welcome back,
liewe
,” she said.

Tears gathered in my father’s eyes. “I’m glad that you’re home, Katie.”

And I was, in a way that I had never been before. In body and in spirit.

***

The winter passed slowly. Storms moved in, blanketing the land in snow.

The army set about offering vaccinations against the Darkness. Most of the Plain people and all the soldiers took advantage of it, except for the very old or sick. My parents took the serum. Even Sarah stood in line to get her shot. She was very brave, announcing that she didn’t cry and showing me the red spot on her arm where the needle had gone in.

And after many Amish had been inoculated, something strange happened. We used fewer lights at night. We could see well enough to get around through our own light. Through my window, it was not uncommon to see soldiers on patrol, glowing like green plastic figures in the darkness. An old man who took the serum died. But no others. Those were acceptable risks.

Alex slept in our living room until I was well enough to ambulate. When I was, he bundled me up in a wagon and took me to the Hexenmeister. I loved being home, eating my mother’s mashed potatoes and listening to my father read the Bible, but there was also something for me at the old man’s house.

It was work. Strange work. I hunched over Herr Stoltz’s drawing table, with my bonnet covering my stubble and stitches. I traced the figures as he explained them to me, followed examples of his calligraphy in old letters. Sitting in his chair, he schooled me on how to mix the paints and inks, and I wrote down the instructions in painstaking detail. Alex worked around the old man’s house, feeding Horace and learning to hunt with Fenrir. He would disappear with the wolf for hours at a time, coming back with a string of rabbits for stew.

The Bishop became a recluse. It was as if he’d imposed the
Bann
on himself, withdrawing into his house and speaking to no one. He refused the vaccine. One cold winter morning, someone went to check on him and found him frozen in his bed. He had not fed his fire for days.

We kept a few cultures of the vaccine in various homes, including the Hexenmeister’s. The army clucked and muttered over the rest, and they took it with them when they fixed their tank and rolled out in late February. Simmonds said that they had a duty to bring the vaccine to the rest of the world.

Elijah went with them. I understood that he was searching for something, something that had been unfulfilled at home. I had been there, and I wished him well as he marched away with the soldiers, the only Plain-dressed man in their green ranks. I had given him Ginger’s wedding rings and her glasses, asked him to find her husband and give them to him.

And there had been no more attacks of the Darkness since the schoolhouse. Alex speculated that somehow, the holiness of our land had been restored.

I wasn’t sure, but I wanted it to be that way. And I tried my best.

As the ice thawed, I slowly climbed up on ladders and began to paint hex signs. I painted one over the door of my parents’ house, another over the Hexenmeister’s. I painted them on every barn and house I could find. The work helped me grow stronger, as the ground softened and the grass began to push up from the mud. My parents had even gathered a group of people to do a barn raising, to rebuild the place that had been my sanctuary before the soldiers had taken it over. I had considered moving Horace back into it, but he had grown attached to the Hexemeister’s horses. The three of them were inseparable, and it seemed cruel to take him away.

Alex had begun to work his way into the fabric of the community, the way that he had worked his way into my life. He started teaching at the schoolhouse. No Outsider had ever been allowed to teach in that room before, but he had a gift for helping the boys and girls understand their numbers and letters. And the older ones felt safe in asking questions about science and philosophy, things living vibrantly in the vast library of his mind. The students would often stay after class, sitting on the steps of the schoolhouse with him and Fenrir and a couple of puppies that looked like wolves with floppy golden retriever ears, listening to him talk about lightning and geography and the history of the printing press. I would come to the school at the end of each day, and we would walk away, hand in hand, with the dogs bounding around us. I knew that the children had never seen this kind of relationship before—a partnership of equals, a Plain woman and an English man.

Things were changing. I think that we were keeping to the root of who we were, not giving that up. But we were adapting.

I was working paint into the side of a barn one morning in March when I heard a sound that I hadn’t heard in a very long time: the caw of a raven.

I turned around to gaze at the field behind me. A solitary raven was walking along the base of a fence, his head bobbing. He was looking at the sky, calling.

I watched him.

More of his fellows came. They came from the trees and the blue sky, hundreds of them chattering, swirling in black. It was as if they’d been separated on grand adventures and they were eager to tell each other of their exploits.

I smiled, knowing that we would have a future. It wouldn’t be a future any of us expected or imagined.

But there would be a future.

L
AURA
B
ICKLE
’s professional background is in criminal justice and library science. When she’s not patrolling the stacks at the public library, she’s dreaming up stories about the monsters under the stairs, and writing contemporary fantasy novels under the name Alayna Williams. Laura lives in Ohio with her husband and five mostly-reformed feral cats.
The Hallowed Ones
was her first teen novel. For more about Laura, please visit her website at:
www.laurabickle.com
.