In what little light there was Will slid the rifle bolt down and checked the chamber, then carefully pushed it back into place. He listened to the soles of heavy booted feet pass by then fade again.
Will cracked the door a little then eased out. Going down the hall was Drew. Will watched him walk, his movements almost robotic. Each step labored and deliberate, one in front of the other all the way to the end, where he let himself back out into the light of day.
When Will heard the door close, he went again into the hallway. Will had not liked what he had seen and he wondered now why Drew was not with Mary May. Will started to doubt himself, but he also feared for Mary May all the more.
He held the rifle out before him and began to walk in the direction Drew had come from, heel then toe, the rubber beneath his boots softly echoing. If she was here she was down this hallway. He looked ahead and continued, his eyes fixed now on where he thought she’d be.
There was a creak of door hinges then the sound of footsteps up ahead. A voice was heard suddenly. A voice Will knew was John’s.
Will moved fast. He took three steps, trying to keep the sound of his own boot soles hidden. The inlaid shadow of a door sat before him, and he ducked in just as he saw John come into sight fifty feet ahead. He was talking to someone, but Will’s own pulse had begun to beat so fast and loud in the channels of his head that he could hear nothing. He had felt this way before. With the big boar grizzly, with his own wife and child, and before all that he had felt this in the war. Now he tried to push this feeling down away from him and loosen its grip from around his skin.
When he bent and looked again around the inlay of the door, John had turned and moved away in the opposite direction. Will saw him open a new door and then disappear within. Will was out and moving down the hallway. His heart still beat inside of him with a thump that shook the skin, but he kept going. He moved because he had to, because he thought there might not be another time. If he was going to save Mary May this was the only time. He only hoped now that he would find her and that whatever had happened to her, wherever she was in the process, was not now at its end.
He came down the hallway with the same fast and silent steps. He reached the door that held the sins within, and he turned the knob now and pulled it open. Mary May was there before him, kneeling on the floor five feet in. Her eyes were glassy and almost nonresponsive as he moved to her and tried to bring her to her feet. The collar of her shirt had been ripped and pulled aside and he could see the beginning of her bra and the naked upper skin of her breastbone. He tried now to gather the material up, to somehow help her.
“Mary May,” he said, whispering to her then turning to look behind him. He had left the door open and he felt the cool air of the hall flowing in like a ghost unseen. He turned back to her, he tried to bring her up and to get her on her feet but she was unmoving. He snapped his fingers in front of her. “Mary May, you need to help me. We need to go. We need to get you out of here. We need to get away from here. You don’t know the things they do.”
She turned her head slightly, and then she met his eyes. “Are you up there?” she asked.
He was watching her. Mary May’s eyes swam beneath her lids like something come loose from all that anchored them, but her voice had stunned him for a moment with how clear and deliberate she had made it sound. He turned again and looked behind him and when he came back to her, he said, “I can lift you. I can lift you out of here and carry you over my shoulder. But if you can walk and help me it would be better. We may need to fight to get out of here. We may need to run and I don’t know if we will get away if it comes down to that.”
Her eyes washed past him now. He tried to meet them as they went. He watched her head roll to the side then turn upward on the wall. “Are you up there, Will? Are you there on that wall with all the rest?”
“Jesus,” Will said. “What did they give you?”
“Are you up there?” she asked again.
“Yes,” he said. He looked around wildly, desperate to escape and knowing if he was found here that it could get no worse. “Can you help me? Can you help me get you out of here?” He did not wait for a response, he bent and lifted, getting her over his shoulder like some backwoods kill. He turned around and began to move for the door but she stopped him.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t take me.”
“What?”
“Don’t take me. Put me down.”
He paused at the doorway, cautious, not wanting to be seen. “What are you talking about?” he asked.
“John is only going to tattoo me,” she said. “I came to get my brother. I came for Drew.”
He didn’t want to listen. He didn’t want to hear what she had to say, but he knew even with whatever drug they’d given her, he knew what she was asking him to do.
“Put me back,” she said again. “Put me back exactly as you found me.” Her voice was so deliberate. Each syllable defined and clear. “If my family ever meant anything to you, put me down.”
He turned and set her down.
She looked up at him. She watched his face as he stood watching hers. “Drew is at the house where they put me last night. He is waiting there. Do you know it?”
She was drugged and he could see it in every movement she made. But there was clarity there, too, like someone surfacing from a coma for a single moment before they were lost again. “Yes,” Will said. “I can find it.”
“I think they killed my father,” she said. She said it almost as if it was an afterthought, but he knew it was not. He knew she had been thinking about it all along. “You need to be careful,” she said. “I came to get my brother and I came to get him out of here. It’s what my daddy wanted. Can you do that for me, Will? You were always one of Daddy’s favorites. You were always missed even though we knew you were not gone. Not really.”
Will turned and looked to the open door. He was losing time. He might lose his life if he stayed here. He knew now what the members of Eden’s Gate were capable of. He knew it was not Lonny alone who had wanted Mary May to die out there. “What about you?”
“John wants to tattoo me. He wants me to be marked so that he can in some way feel he controls me.”
Her words were clear, but he could still see the drug working away at her. She had felt lifeless as a sack of grain when he had lifted her. Will turned again. He had to go. He kept his eyes on the doorway a half second longer, and then he brought the hunting knife up from where he’d put it on his belt. He turned back and lowered the knife down and hid it between the floor and her calf.
“You can’t trust John,” Will said. “You can’t trust anything he says. You might need to get out of here on your own. You might need to use the knife. I’ll get your brother, and then I’ll figure something out. I’ll try and come back for you if I can. The pastor from town, Jerome, is waiting with his car on a road to the northwest, up above the Eden’s Gate property. I’m telling this to you because you might need to get out of here on your own. You understand me?”
She nodded.
He gave her one last look, then he turned and ran. Halfway down the hallway he heard the doorway behind open, and he dashed forward and hid again in the place he had before. When he peered back out, down the hallway, John was moving upward with his eyes on the doorway and the room within where Mary May waited. He held in one hand a medical kit and in the other he carried the metal surgical tray Will knew held the tattoo gun and ink.