She started running, moving away from the lake in the way Will had told her to go. Any effect of the drug was gone now, either sweated from her system or expunged by her own adrenaline. She was nearly at the dense trees that climbed the bluff when the first bullet round hit the nearest trunk. She turned only briefly and saw the ten or so members of Eden’s Gate advancing toward her, and who had no doubt seen her running straight on toward the bluff and the road above that she hoped to use for her escape.
By the time she came to the incline of the hill and started to climb, the bullets from six or seven guns were digging up the earth all around her and the trees were coming apart in a hail of wood chips and falling branches. But then in an instant all the gunfire and the sound of the bullets digging up the woods completely stopped, and for a half second, she thought the world had been sucked up and away into the vortex of some tornado that had rendered the world mute.
The light of the explosion hit her first, followed closely by the sound and Mary May turned to see the mushroom cloud expanding, and moving ever higher there above the Eden’s Gate compound. She’d been scrambling up the hillside with her hands outstretched on the incline and her feet digging beneath her as she climbed. She looked back down the way she’d come and saw between the thin pines below a new column of smoke rising to the sky. She moved over until she could see what was left of a house. Just a dark black patch in the otherwise brown and green expanse below. Will had told her nothing of a house exploding and for longer than she should have, she stared at the place the house had been and wondered now whether Will and Drew in some way had been within.
She had little time to dwell on any of this. She could not explain what had happened and though she was worried, she had to believe Will and Drew had not doubled back somehow and made a final stand within the house. Looking now, she saw several of the church members had followed her into the forest and while they had turned, taking in this new disaster, Mary May cut across the slope, moving with the swiftness of some mountain animal. And now as she moved up she could see she’d increased her lead as the slope began to round.
The sun was still out, but it had begun to lower toward the horizon and the chill of the place could be felt now against her skin. The shirt John had ripped down the middle hung open and the exposed skin of her chest was covered in a collection of sweat, blood, ink, and the dirt of her own escape. Sometimes she moved fully upright, but mostly she had climbed with her hands outstretched, the gun wedged down the back of her pants as she went.
She chanced one more look back the way she’d come, letting her vision pan across the slope. Nothing could be seen but the wavering flow of wind as it moved through the branches above. No sound of rocks cut loose by those that followed her. No gunshots. No shouts or voices. The place seemed eerily normal to her, and it was this sense of normality among the more current chaos that frightened her most. She took one last look back across the path she’d made, then moved, hands outward on the slope again. All the while she thought that if she’d heard just one shot fired far out there in this landscape of forest and lakeshore, she might have felt some relief for Will or for her brother, but that she had not heard anything at all now scared her more than all that had come before.
SHE CAME OVER THE TOP OF THE HILLSIDE WITH A CHILL SWEAT across her brow and down along her exposed clavicle. Through the trees she saw the road ahead. She pushed herself up and went into a full run. She was midway to the road when she saw Jerome. He was just south of where she’d thought he’d be, closer even than she’d hoped.
Jerome met her halfway and she fell against him and he held her for only a moment before turning her toward the ancient Oldsmobile. “Where’s Will?” he asked. He looked now to the trees and forest she had herself run from. “He isn’t with you?”
They reached the car and she let him help her with the door then help her to sit within. She was breathing hard and the sweat felt cool on her skin now in a way it hadn’t before.
“What about Will? I heard the explosion. I came out to the edge of the hill but I couldn’t see anything but smoke rising up above the trees. Is he okay?”
This was a hard question for her. She hadn’t had time to process it, she hadn’t had much more of a thought in her head than to simply escape. Run. Climb. Get the fuck out of there. But now, with Jerome waiting on her she did not know what to say. She looked back toward the forest. She almost wanted to see Will and her brother there. Will making his own escape, running, trying to find them where they sat. But no one was there. Just the wind through the trees—just the emptiness of the forest as it stared back at her. “I’m not sure Will made it,” Mary May said, her eyes still on the forest.
“He’s dead?”
“I don’t know.” She turned away from the forest. She looked to Jerome. She looked on the road ahead. “We need to go,” she said. “We need to get out of here before we can’t get out of here at all.”
He looked at her, and then he closed the door. He came around the front of the car then pulled his own door open and sat in the driver’s seat. He leaned forward and cranked the engine.
“I told Will to get my brother,” Mary May said. “But we couldn’t all get out together. Will and Drew went one way and I went the other. Will said they’d meet us down the road. But I’m just not sure if they made it.” She could feel her voice beginning to break a little at the edges. This—being in Jerome’s car—was the first time in nearly a day she had had a chance simply to sit and to reflect on her own existence. To realize how very, very dangerous Eden’s Gate had become.
Jerome hit the gas and they started down the double track. She looked out on the road ahead then turned and looked back at the place where she’d come up over the hill. She wondered about her brother and she wondered about Will and whether either of them were still alive.
WILL HAD TOLD HER “GO” AND HE’D WATCHED MARY MAY TURN and run toward the stand of trees and that was the last he saw of her.
He held Drew up over his shoulder and the man’s weight alone was almost enough to buckle Will at the knees. But he thought now, you got yourself into this, said you’d go get the brother like a fool. Now what?
He set out in a heavy trot, his boots scuffing across the dirt as he cut down toward the rolling lands just beyond the lake. He came off the small hill where the church sat and ran on into the lowlands, scraped by glacial flows a few thousand years before, but now populated by ferns and trees. Ahead, through the sparse growth of forest he saw where the hillside began, moving unevenly up toward the high bluff and the road that ran atop it, the feel of the rifle swinging on the strap over his shoulder, the weight of Drew upon his other side. No one shot at him or followed him and, still moving, he turned slightly to the side and looked back at the church and Eden’s Gate and he wondered why.
The sound of the trucks froze him right there in place. He turned fully now and looked back toward the compound. Five trucks were rolling in past the gate, the dust moving off them as they went. And as Will watched he knew without a doubt that everything he’d gone through already that day had nothing on what was now approaching.