Nineteen

Their living quarters were clean and spacious and cool. Devoid of all but the most basic artistic touches—a few earthy rugs, thick matching curtains, and oil paintings that could have been done by anyone there, even the children—the place was nearly Spartan.

A sofa flanked by simple wooden end tables sat across from three large bookcases brimming with hardbound books, paperbacks, and heaped, tattered magazines. There was no television. Mathilda sat on the sofa, an infant attached to her bare right breast while Little Huff sat on the rug, as deeply engaged in hammering together his blocks as before.

“Colleen,” Mathilda said, adjusting the child at her breast.

“Hello,” Colleen said, walking alongside Sally.

The adjacent room was far more colorful, its walls adorned with posters depicting smiling cartoon characters. There were a few small desks in the center of the room, each of them facing a large chalkboard mounted upon the wall. Scrawled in purple chalk atop the overlapping powdery ghosts of previous lessons were the words: THE CIRCLE IS PURPLE. If there was ever a circle, it had been erased.

They children lay on mats, motionless, down for a nap between lessons.

In another room, Evie sat before a sewing machine, her foot pumping away, the needle punching thread into the colorful quilt taking shape before her. Again the colorful geometric patterns, hanging from the walls and draped across the furniture.

Colleen paused, realizing why they were familiar. “I saw some of these for sale in town.”

“Huff likes us to have a hobby,” Sally said, leading Colleen past the sewing room and into a room containing two beds, a dresser, and a window. “We all work on the quilts, and he sells them to stores all over northern California.” Her voice dropped low as she drew close to Colleen. “The patterns are more of his bullshit. Some mystical nonsense.”

“Oh,” Colleen, said, also whispering. She stepped to the window, which looked out on a large yard with various planting beds and caged bushes, sloping up toward the thickly forested hills beyond.

“Pretty, huh?” Sally said.

“Yeah,” Colleen said, sitting on the edge of the bed.

“That one’s mine, actually,” Sally said, then pointing to the other bed. “This one is yours.”

“Oh, I didn’t... this isn’t the room...”

“That’s Embeth’s room, the one you woke up in,” Sally said, easing herself onto Colleen’s bed. “For when she’s not staying with Huff, which is rare.”

“Oh.”

“You should lie down a while.”

“I’m not tired,” Colleen said.

“Trust me, you’ll fall asleep.” With her right hand, Sally mimed sticking her left arm with a syringe.

Colleen opened her mouth to reply.

Sally shushed her, and her excitement from earlier was visibly drained. “Lie down a while,” she said. “I’ll wake you before Huff gets here.”

“Okay,” Colleen said. “I’ll try.”

“You do that,” Sally said. She stood up and waddled out of the room, closing the door behind her.

Colleen waited a few seconds and got to her feet a little too fast, and the world rotated beneath her feet. She steadied herself against the wall and wondered when they had drugged her. When she was asleep? She’d considered the water a possibility, but it hadn’t tasted funny, and Sally had indicated that she’d gotten an injection of some kind. Still, she didn’t feel tired, or even high. Rubbery, but nothing more.

She went to the window, focusing not on the view but on the window itself. It did not appear capable of being opened. She looked around the room a few times and then sat on her bed. After a few minutes, she lay back. Staring at the ceiling and expecting not to fall asleep, she closed her eyes.

When she opened them, Mathilda’s hand was on her shoulder. “Rise and shine,” she said.

“Mnn,” Colleen said. “How long…?”

“A little over two hours.”

“God,” she said, sitting up. There was a lingering, tingling pain in her left bicep, and Colleen knew the woman in her room, formerly a nurse, had just shot her up. Her hands felt light and heavy at the same time. Stronger dose, whatever it was. Maybe they would make her into a junkie. That wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe she could even find the needle on the bitch who stuck her. That would be better.

“Listen, honey,” Mathilda said, sitting next to her and taking her hand once more. They kept doing this, and it never felt okay or good. “You’re going to be okay here. Huff is a great man. You’ll see. Now come on.”

Mathilda led her to the bathroom, and for the second time that day she allowed herself to be undressed and showered by another woman. Unlike Embeth, Mathilda disrobed and joined her beneath the hot spray of the shower head. She let her eyes trace the contours of Mathilda’s body, her heavy yet well shaped breasts, her thighs and stomach soft and dimpled from motherhood. The woman lathered Colleen’s body, her hands lingering upon her breasts, and Colleen could do nothing to stop any of it. Another layer peeled back, and through the cloud encircling her mind she saw where things were going. Huff had himself a nice little harem out here in the middle of nowhere, and before she fed him his balls she would be taken lower and lower still.

It was over and then she was dressed. Same bra, new underwear and cloth pad to replace the fresh one from earlier, now heavily soaked. New red gown. She sat down as the woman dried her hair, and though Colleen expected Mathilda to attempt to weave her shoulder-length hair into a tight braid, it did not come to pass. Seated at the back of her mind and peering out, she knew that it too would come later, in the form of what Kimberly liked to call ritualized nonsense.

Kimberly. Always talking. As ready and eager to have fun as she was to launch into a political diatribe. As incensed as she was happy. But since the deer and the news that came after, only shocked and stunned silence. And now?

Dressed and dried and wearing soft slippers that hissed across the carpet, Colleen drifted behind Mathilda, out of the bathroom and into the living room, where she settled like a snowflake upon the couch and stared at the bookcase while the women floated in and out of her field of vision. At some point, Baby Huff hobbled over to her and, placing a small hand upon each of her knees, gazed smiling into her face. She tried to pick him up, but he darted from between her hands, his trailing squeal breaking into a giggle that followed him out of the room.

“Doped you up pretty good, huh?” Sally said, seeming to have appeared beside Colleen.

“Yuh,” Colleen said. She said something else, too, but forgot it the moment it came into the air. She sat and tried to remember it and when she looked to her left Sally was gone.

The light outside changed. The day wore on. She thought of the dead. She thought of her mother and of her brother. She tried and failed to remember something about Guy other than her final bloody moments with him. The scene played out behind her eyes, again and again, a hellish snake devouring its tail, but the dope made it seem less horrible, and she was grateful for that.

The details of her surroundings came to her. She could hear Mathilda giving the older children their lessons in the next room. Further away, the sound of the sewing machine. Sally sat at a chair to the left of the bookcases, a hardback opened before her. Colleen tried to make sense of the spine. Stamped in gold foil, the letters made little sense, and she wondered if perhaps Sally were reading a foreign language edition. She tried again, frowning, her head tilted, nearly resting upon her left shoulder.

Mathilda stared at Colleen above the book.

“Doing okay?”

“Sure,” Colleen said. “Feel like a million bucks.”

“It’s good that you can joke.” Sally set the book on her lap.

“Good book?”

“Eh,” Mathilda said, shrugging. “I’ve never cared that much for him.”

“Who?” Colleen asked. She pointed to her eyes. “I can’t tell. They’re all blurry.”

“Nietzsche.”

“Oh,” Colleen said, thinking of her brother, the little shit. She hoped he was alive, God.

“What is it—” Sally began, her words cut off by the sound of the door opening. Her head whipped left, and Colleen followed her gaze, but not before seeing the look on Sally’s face change. Just like that, she went from looking like the defiant woman Colleen had met mere hours ago to wearing the mask of an adoring believer. She was good.

“Papa Huff,” Sally said, trying to stand.

“No, God, no,” the big man with the strong arms and the large gut said, waving for her to stay the hell where she was. “Jesus, woman.” He walked over to her, took her hand, and, bending forward, kissed her on the cheek. His braided beard swung away from his chest, and Colleen noticed that his hair also hung down his back in a single braid.

“Oh, Papa,” Sally said, her voice spinning somewhere in deepest space. She sounded a little like Mathilda.

“How’s my baby?” Huffington Niebolt said, dropping to one knee.

“I’m fine, Papa,” Sally said, looking at Colleen over the top of Niebolt’s head, which rested now upon her bulbous stomach. Sally stroked his head, traced a finger along the ridges of his braid. What would he do if he knew the child in her stomach didn’t belong to him?

“Aren’t you a funny girl?” Niebolt said, opening his eyes. They were on Colleen. He stood, grunting. One of his knees popped. Face expressionless, he assessed her. She held his gaze until she no longer could. Just as she was about to look down at her heavy hands resting upon her lap, his vacant expression pulled itself into a smile that spread up from his mouth and reached his eyes.

“How are you?” Niebolt asked, took a tentative step toward her, his brow creased in a look of sympathy as apparently genuine as the concern in his voice.

“Not too good,” she said. No point in lying.

“Oh, now,” he said. “I know you’re hurting, darl—”

Little Huff squealed, running toward his father.

“Hey, big boy!” Niebolt said, scooping up the child and tossing him into the air.

“Deeee,” the child cried, laughing.

“Deeee,” Niebolt said, smiling, tossing his son into the air—once, twice, and again. Spinning in place, the braid at the back of his head nearly horizontal. Colleen watched, sure there could be no other explanation: she was in hell. A trite response. Kimberly would have been disappointed.

“Now, now,” Niebolt said, coming to a stop and wagging a stern finger in the child’s face, panting. “Enough of that, son. Dad’s gotta—”

The kid’s face grew sour and red. His laughter collapsed into tears.

“Where’s the thing,” Niebolt said, holding the child to his side with his left arm and snapping the fingers of his right hand inches from Sally’s face.

“Oh,” she said, looking around. Not finding what she sought, she pulled herself to her feet, legs bent at the knees, her right hand pressed to the small of her back. “It’s—I’ll be right back.”

Sally crept out of the room. Niebolt held the child to his chest now, his left hand beneath the Little Huff’s bottom, his right gently patting the child’s back, enveloping it. “Shhhh,” he said, not taking his eyes off of Colleen. Still crying, the boy rested his head upon his father’s shoulder.

“Now, now,” Niebolt said. Sally returned, pressed a pacifier to the child’s lips, silencing his whimpers.

“Thank you, doll,” Niebolt said, staring Colleen into the couch. He smiled, just a half smile, and this time it did not reach his eyes.

“Can I get you anything, Papa?” Sally asked, pressing as close to Niebolt as her massive stomach allowed.

“You can take this sack of potatoes,” he said, passing Little Huff to Sally. He walked over to the couch upon which Colleen sat, throwing himself onto the far end. A single seat cushion separated her from him, and Colleen wondered how long it would take him to glide across to her and place his hand upon her knee.

“Agh,” he said, throwing his head back, rubbing his eyes, and staring at the ceiling. “Terrible damn day, ladies. Terrible damn day.”

“I’m sorry, Papa,” Sally said, easing herself into her chair.

“Mnph,” Niebolt said, pressing his thumb and forefinger into his eyes before sitting up straight and looking at Sally. “Where is everybody?”

“Evie is sewing,” Sally said, and Colleen realized that she no longer heard the sewing machine. She hadn’t gotten a close look at the blankets, but she assumed that some of the more intricate designs were easier accomplished by hand.

“Ah, yeah? And Mattie—still in class?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, good,” he said, leaning back. “I’m going to close my eyes for a few.” He looked at Colleen, half-smiled once more and closed his eyes.

Colleen and Sally watched one another for what felt like several minutes, at which point Colleen realized that she was holding her breath. She let it out, slowly, and permitted her body to relax. She didn’t need to look at her palms to know that her fingernails had stamped little crescents into them. She looked around and it wasn’t until she became aware of Sally slowly shaking her head left to right, left to right, that she knew what she was looking for: a weapon.

Not now, Sally’s eyes whispered, and Colleen held her gaze. Across the couch from Colleen, Niebolt snored gently, his massive gut rising and falling in the corner of her eye. The minutes stretched into years and she found herself wondering just what this pregnant woman had in mind when she said jailbreak. Was it so common for their captor lay asleep with his throat exposed? Why were they passing this moment up?

Colleen stared at Sally and Sally started at Colleen while big Huff and his little son slept, and eventually the door leading into the classroom opened and Mathilda stepped out, followed closely by Jack and David and the girl—once more, Colleen could not remember her name.

One of the boys—Colleen could not tell whom, nor did she care—leapt onto Niebolt’s lap, waking him.

“Oh, hey,” he said, laughing. “Watch the stones, boy.”

He went through the routine, playing with each of them in turn. He bounced the girl on his knee and stroked and nuzzled her hair, and Colleen looked away, uncertain whether or not what she saw was fatherly adoration or something malignant. Soon Evie shuffled out of the back room, and from somewhere there came the sound of a crying infant. Yes, the infant—Mathilda’s child. Colleen had forgotten about it.

“Not a lot of time, girls,” Niebolt said, snapping his fingers again. “Make it happen.”

Mathilda led the twins and the girl outside, to the courtyard, urging them to occupy themselves until the grownups were done talking. Little Huff slept and sighed across Sally’s chest, his small legs parted over the swell of her stomach. Evie went into the back and returned with the crying infant, whom she passed off to Mathilda shortly before relieving Sally of the sleeping potato sack and sitting between Colleen and Niebolt. Colleen watched all of this, out there in faraway, her mind aflutter at the outer reaches of itself, her body little more than a hum fashioned from meat and bone.

Then: silence. Little Huff asleep in the arms of Evie; the infant sucking at Mathilda’s breast, its tiny fists kneading pale, veined flesh, and Sally merely watching, her fingers interlaced atop her bulging stomach, interlaced like a prayer, like armor.

“Okay,” Niebolt said, standing, looking from woman to woman to woman to woman. He scratched at his chin, and the braid hanging across his chest jerked like a dying snake. “None of this is going the way it usually does, and that’s, well, it’s inconvenient, but that’s also life, right, Sal?”

“Yes,” Sally said, not missing a beat.

“Yes. Damn right,” He said, pacing. “Life, by definition, is inconvenient. If it’s not, if it’s convenient it’s not life at all. It’s routine and complacency and it’s a lie. So this, this new thing, this is life.”

He strode over to the bookcase, walking with a purpose that was, Colleen knew, all a part of the show. She looked left and right, scanning the spines, brushing his fingertips across them. Finally, he faced them, once more meeting every line of sight. He nodded.

“The men who wrote these books knew that,” he said, and Colleen imagined Kimberly at her side, could practically hear her: men and women, you sexist piece of shit. Then again, maybe not: Colleen had not taken the time to inspect the books heaped helter-skelter upon the many shelves. “They knew that, and we know it, too. Sometime we forget it, though.

“So we don’t get to do things how we used to, but who cares? Our family has a new member,” he said, extending one hand, palm up, fingers and thumb held tight together. “Colleen. Mama Colleen. She came to us through blood and pain, and for that I am sorry. Really, I am.”

Again the apology. Only now it felt less real and more like a line in a play. Maybe it had always been such, and Colleen was only now able to discern the truth behind the façade.

Niebolt grew silent and became occupied with his right hand. With his thumbnail he picked at dirt beneath his fingernails, starting at the pinky and working his way to the forefinger. When he was finished, he looked up, his gaze falling upon Colleen, shrinking her.

“Blood and pain,” he said, pursing his lips. “Blood and pain have always been the common language of mankind. Always, from the very beginning, from the start. But now? Now it is so much more than language. It is everything. It is the only thing there is. Colleen?”

Colleen sat pressing herself into the sofa. And into the back of her mind, but it was so much harder now to remain there. The shit in her blood was losing its edge, and she found herself inching forward, closer and closer still, in small measures, to the man before her and the world into which she had been delivered.

“Colleen?”

“Yuh,” She began, licking her lips. “Yes?”

“You may have noticed that we have no television here.”

Colleen blinked and nodded agreeably, thinking of the old television in the abandoned tomb of a house at the bottom of the hill.

“Nothing even remotely associated with the truth can be found upon its screen,” Niebolt said, turning once more to face the bookcases. He waved an encompassing spiral at the shelves. “Here, there is, at least, an attempt. These men sought truth, as we seek truth. Many of them discovered only lies and, finding those lies to be sweet, allowed themselves to stumble from the path. The path that leads to truth.”

Niebolt laughed. “Forgive me, ladies, there’s a point here, I promise. You’ll see. Now, doubt is a valuable thing, right?”

“Right,” Sally and Evie and Mathilda each said, in unison. Colleen looked at Sally, who met her eyes but for a half-second, the time in which it took her to lift and lower her eyebrows.

“Right, right,” Niebolt said, stepping past Sally and brushing his fingers across her stomach as he had brushed them across the books lining the shelves. “Doubt is a good thing. Doubt it a tool in the search for truth. I mean, where would we be if we believed everything everyone told us? We’d be like everyone else, right?”

“Right,” they all said, and Colleen felt a chill ripple up and down her spine.

“Sure. So I understand, trust me, I do,” Niebolt said, dropping the hammer. “I know that some of you have come to doubt my words.”

Colleen looked at Sally, and Sally met Colleen’s gaze, and neither of them were fast enough to sever their connection before Niebolt noticed. He smiled, lifted an admonishing finger.

“Stay with me now, I’m coming to my point.”

He held out both hands, fingers splayed, made a show of balling them into fists. Bobbing and weaving, he jabbed the air with his left three times, four times, six times, fast, wrapping up his display with a solid right uppercut.

“I was a boxer, Colleen,” he said, rubbing the knuckles of his right hand with the fingers of his left, distant eyes upon the ground at his feet, as if soaking in the unconscious sprawl of some fallen opponent. “A long time ago. A pretty good one, too. They called me The Nightmare. Huffington “The Nightmare” Niebolt. Silly, but hell did it look good up there on the marquee.”

He beamed, gaze somewhere far beyond the room in which they gathered.

“God, did it ever. And it made the mooks I had to fight nervous. Helped build my reputation, even if I was just knocking out bums. Who the hell wanted to get into the ring with a nightmare?”

He shook his head.

“A lot of guys didn’t,” he said. “And a lot of them did. One of them, this young wop called Tony ‘The Fire’ Faraci, he wanted it bad. He was a little thing, man, I tell you…” Niebolt shook his head.

His women kept their eyes on him, and Colleen wondered if any of them had noticed how the cadence and the rhythm of his voice had changed as he began speaking of his days in the ring. He no longer sounded like someone pretending to be wise and all-knowing: he sounded like a dumb kid from the streets looking to punch his way to happiness.

“This little bastard, I mean, not everyone was enforcing the weight class back then, and we were fighting in some Chicago dive, so who gave a shit, right?” He paced faster now, the years carrying him away. “The point is, the guy was too small to be fighting me, and he was taking a risk getting in that ring. He was too small to be fighting The Nightmare, and he had no business almost killing my ass.”

Niebolt bobbed and weaved, unleashed another flurry of punches upon his unseen and long gone opponent, and stopped, just like that, his hands limp at his sides, his head down. Then he looked at Colleen, and it was as if no one else were there. The other women had heard this story—God knew how many times. Some of them had even heard different versions, if Sally was to be believed, but this—this was just for her.

“He knocked me out in the third,” Niebolt said. “He was fast and strong, and I was full of myself. I knew he was strong, and I knew he could take a punch. His face was messed up enough to testify to that truth, Colleen.”

Niebolt mashed his grizzled features together between his large hands, smiling, and curiously enough it was only at this moment that Colleen was slammed with the certainty that he was insane.

“I expected to pound his face into something uglier than it already was, maybe over the course of seven or eight rounds, before laying his ass out,” Niebolt said. “Instead his fucking hands worked my head like a hundred little bees, and I almost died. Between the ring and the hospital, that’s when I saw the angel.”

He looked from woman to woman, and Colleen knew that she was seeing something else, a remnant, something unfinished.

“I don’t really want to get into how I can believe in angels and not believe in God, Colleen, despite what some of these ladies would like,” he said, holding out his hands. They were perfectly still, like stone. “Her hair was yellow and orange, like fire, and it was in a braid.” He fingered the braid hanging from his chin, looking a little embarrassed. “And she held me in her arms and told me that I was going to live forever. She said I was going to live forever, and that I would see much pain and blood, and that it would be up to me to go into the wild and to start a family, one that would escape the pain and the blood.”

He smiled once more, revealed his white mouthful of fake choppers, rubbing his hands together. “And that brings us to the end of this little digression: the angel was real, and the pain and the blood are upon us.”

He let the silence drag out, watched his women, the expression on his face a dare to all of them: say something right now and see what happens.

“Doubt,” he shouted. Little Huff jerked in his sleep, whimpered. The sermon was back on. “Some of you have the seed of doubt in your hearts.”

The women made faces that said otherwise, but Niebolt wasn’t having it. He waved them away. “No, no,” he said, the boxer gone. “It’s okay. Doubt is natural. I encourage you to doubt, but in this there can be no doubt. Its time is passed. Colleen?”

“What?” She asked. Her blood was cold and her body was not elsewhere. It was right here and it was made of stone.

“Blood and pain.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve seen it, out there.” He thrust an accusing finger toward the front door. Again Little Huff stirred. Sated and asleep, the infant resting in Mathilda’s arms jerked, its small arms rigid and quivering.

“Yes,” Colleen said. Niebolt wasn’t talking about the attack on her, her brother, and their friends. Colleen glanced at Sally, saw fear in her eyes, and once more looked down at her hands. They shook.

“The time is upon us. The dead walk the earth and eat the flesh of the living. I’ve seen them,” Niebolt said, walking over to Colleen, dropping to his knees, folding her hands into his own. “You have, too. Haven’t you, Colleen?”

“I don’t…” Colleen said, stammering. She felt Sally’s gaze upon her face and met it. The pregnant woman’s eyes shone with the promise of tears.

“You don’t nothing,” Niebolt said. “The dead walk, and the world that you knew, only days ago, crumbles and burns. Doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Colleen said, tears streaming down her face. “Yes.”

“Pain and blood,” Niebolt said, triumphant. “Pain and blood.”

Mathilda’s infant cried. Colleen didn’t look up from her hands, but she didn’t have to. She knew. Sally was crying too.