A video camera.
Wide-angle lens. High definition. Perched like a silent Cyclops to the immediate left of a mounted deer head behind and above the counter. I looked into the glass eyes of the dead deer and into the glass eye of the live camera, streaming real-time video to someplace.
As the clerk counted back change, I asked, “Where’s Mount Gilead?”
“What’s that?”
“Mount Gilead. Probably not much left. Like an old logging camp back in the mountains.”
“Sounds like someplace in the Bible, not in Virginia. Never heard of it.” He looked directly at me, unblinking while he tapped tobacco slivers into a pipe bowl.
“Thank you.”
He nodded and I left. I began filling the tank with gas, my back to the store entrance. I could see the store from the reflection in the side mirror. I saw the clerk answer the phone, his head nodding. The call was brief. I was twisting the gas cap back on the rental car when I heard the gravel crunching, someone approaching quickly. I spun around just as the clerk raised his arm, an ice pick clenched in his right fist.
I ducked, the ice pick missing me by inches. I grabbed his arm at the wrist, twisting it behind his back, shoving hard. Pushing his arm to his shoulder blades. Snapping bones and cartilage. The noise like someone stepping hard on a Styrofoam cup. He screamed, a painful howling. Then I spun him around and drove my forearm into his mouth, shattering teeth like hitting a corncob with a baseball bat. He dropped to his knees vomiting pulled pork, white bread and blood.
I grabbed him by the collar and shouted, “Where’s Dillon Flanagan? Tell me!”
He tried to focus on me, his eyes drifting. I said, “Where’s the Prophet?”
He attempted to smile, nerves in his smashed lips twitching, his eyes watering. He coughed and said, “Exodus.”
“Look at me! Where’s the Prophet?”
“Exodus.” Then he slumped over, his eyes dazed, and he mumbled, “Nobody finds the Prophet ‘ceptin’ God himself. Exodus. You have been set apart to the LORD today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day. Exodus.”
I left him sprawled in the gravel lot, mumbling. I jumped in the rental and sped off, gravel and dust flying. My phone buzzed. Dave Collins said, “I’ve got Courtney’s location on GPS.”
“Where?”
“Not too far from you. I have your location and Courtney’s on a split-screen computer satellite grid here in my boat. Sean, she’s about twenty-two miles from where you are right now. Take Highway 797 to the right. Go north to Goose Creek — to an unmarked dirt road. Looks like there’s an old logging road about eighteen miles down on your left. If Dillon’s got her, they could be walking because the GPS location dot is moving slowly. So she’s not in a car. And it appears on a satellite topographical map of Virginia that she’s in some very remote mountain country. Better hurry, Sean.”
“Let me know if you can find an elevated area, a clear area, where I can spot them — someplace where I can get off a shot. That might be my fastest way to stop Dillon.”
95
They led Courtney back in time. It was a small community of long-standing log cabins with river-rock chimneys, rough-hewn one-story buildings, split rail fences, a small clapboard store and a grist mill by a running stream. The big wooden wheel turned slowly as water from a trough was channeled and diverted to fall onto the blades of the timeworn wheel.
Courtney looked at the people as she was led, arms tied behind her back, like a captured prisoner into their world. The smell of wood smoke drifted over the settlement. Women looked up curiously from the creek where they washed clothes. One man, pushing a wooden wheel-barrow piled high with corn, set it down and stared. Barefoot children wearing bib overalls played by the stream.
The men and woman were dressed in Amish-style clothes — long dresses for the women, overalls for the men. None of the men wore hats. They all watched her with suspicion as Dillon Flanagan and three of his men walked into the camp. Courtney noticed that many of the women were pregnant.
Dillon turned to her and said, “You’re blood related to some of those children, Courtney. They’re your little cousins. All of the women swollen with child are swollen with my children.” He grinned and whispered, “My seed will never be removed from the garden.”
Dillon stepped up on the sawed-off stump of a tree. He shouted, “Gather about brothers and sisters. More than two dozen people formed a semi-circle around him and Courtney. He said, “This poor woman is unclean. She fornicates … prostitutes her body for the pleasure of men. She is not without redemption, but she must be isolated, taken to her knees in the dark to understand the depth of her sins. God requires it of us.”
“Amen, Prophet,” said one of the men.
Dillon nodded, his penetrating eyes scanning the rapt faces of his followers. “She is a descendent of Caesar, an emissary.”
Courtney felt like she’d awakened in a nightmare. She screamed, “No! I’m not a descendent of Caesar and I’m not a prostitute. My grandmother was Dillon’s mother. He’s my uncle. Yes! It’s true. And he raped me. The first time when I was eleven. He stopped when I turned fourteen. And he’ll rape your children, too.”
“Blasphemy!” shouted Dillon. “You’re wicked. If she’s released, she will tell them about us, and they’ll come here. They will hang us from the cross.”
Courtney shook her head. “Can’t you see he’s insane? What did he do? Did he hypnotize everyone here? Can’t you see him for what he really is … a sick fake?”
I followed Dave’s directions, driving up a steep, unpaved road that was carved around the perimeter of a mountain. He said, “It looks like there’s an overlook — a cliff, maybe, about a half mile to the north of where I see Courtney’s location. The satellite images are pretty good. But they appear to have been shot in the fall when leaves are off most of the trees. So I don’t know exactly what you’ll be able to see, if anything.”
“How close am I to this place?”
“Maybe a quarter mile. Whatever Dillon is doing with Courtney, there is very little movement. They’ve stopped … looks like it’s in a clearing near a large expanse of woods. Unless Dillon tossed her phone, somehow she’s managed to keep it and to keep it turned on. I could lose the connection any second.”
“I’ll be at the overlook in less than a minute.”
“You can’t get there fast enough, Sean.”
When I came around a bend in the road, it looked like a door had opened to hell.
“Courtney!” I yelled.
Dave was saying something as I dropped my phone in the passenger seat.
A Toyota pickup truck was burning in a ditch on the side of the road. Flames roared from the open windows, tires belching black smoke, the sounds of metal popping, glass shattering.
The hungry and ugly sound of a ravenous fire devouring prey.
Was Courtney inside the truck? Could someone have stolen her phone?
I ran to the truck, the heat like a furnace from fifty feet away. I held my arm up to shield my face from the fire, trying to see if Courtney’s body was behind the melting steering wheel. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so helpless.
No one in the crowd said anything. They simply stared at Courtney, collective eyes shifting over to Dillon who shouted, “Dig a hole — a grave, back up in the field of clover, beyond the grove.” He turned to a tall, lanky, scarecrow of a man. “Brother William, my carpenter!”