"Some friends of theirs had moved to a place in New Mexico. They'd joined a kind of white collar commune. Everyone did some sort of work they could do remotely. Computer people, consultants, analysts, visual design people, some radiologists and lawyers. They all lived on this ranch. The idea was to raise kids together, to live in a place where they could share parenting duties, where they could be a little shielded from the law, maybe do some hippie things together."
The images came across as bright and colorful. Kids running around in the New Mexico sunshine, smiling grownups picking them up and swooping them through the air, pushing them on the swings.
"They had some shared rules and rituals. There was a Sunday night thing all the families had to go to. Somewhere between a church service and a town hall. It was a hippie thing." Her tears had stopped. She was trembling, though, anticipating something to come.
Annoyance flashed across Sam's face. They were hailing her. Her superiors. Her eyes flicked to one side, silenced a notification.
She looked back at Kade, became present with him again.
"The place was called Yucca Grove." She swallowed.
She saw Kade frown, the name familiar, reaching for the memory… "Yucca Grove? Isn't that where…?" His eyes went wide. Something chilled him. He pulled her closer. "Oh no, oh, Sam, I'm so sorry."
"Shhhh. It's OK. I have to finish this."
He held her as she spoke, as she showed him with her mind.
"The first couple years were good. Really fun." Laughter. Carefully contained bonfires in the back. Two dozen "cousins" and playmates. Hiking in the green Sangre de Cristo mountains. And love, love, love. Her mother's kind face and melodic voice. Her father's mischievous sense of humor. Her sister's squeals of delight at each new prank and trick they played together.
"Then it started to change." A listlessness in her parents. Laughter draining out. Smiles only during the rapture of Sunday nights. A rapture she didn't share. A rapture Ana didn't share. Then the bad men.
"It was called the Communion virus. It tweaked the brain. It was supposed to bring people closer together, make them less selfish, more empathic. It did something to the temporal lobe, one of the circuits involved in religious experience. It was supposed to put people closer to God. It did that. It also made them slaves." Anger rose up in her. The bad men. The ones who were immune. The way they took over the enclave. The way they made everyone else serve them. Stole their money. Crushed their spirits. The control. The abuses.
"Some of the survivors claimed that the whole commune had chosen to take it together. Some say they never took it, that someone used it against them as a weapon. I can imagine my parents trying it voluntarily. They weren't scared. They loved the idea of group living, of altruism, of harmony." It came out bitter. She was still angry with her parents. Angry that they'd failed to protect her. No… not her. That they'd failed to protect Ana.
"I don't know. I can't ask them. They died." Kade was numb, horrified, concerned, just watching, listening, empathizing, trying to comfort her with his mind, with his arm around her and his hand stroking her face.
"There were thirteen of them that ran the place after that." Their faces filled her mind. The memory of their cruelties, their abuses. The cigarette burn on her thigh. The blow that had knocked a tooth out of her mouth. Worse. Much, much worse…
"The prophet and his twelve disciples. All men."
She flicked her eyes to one corner to dismiss another message from her superiors, brought her eyes back to his.
Kade swallowed. He wanted to look away, wanted to not hear this, not know this. He endured. He held her and listened, sent her what comfort he could.
"The prophet. He was a bastard. He was naturally immune. It didn't drag him down. He figured out that he could make all the rest do what he wanted. He found the others, the ones with the most resistance, all men. Made them his disciples. Let them have anything they wanted, as long as they reinforced his control."
"They set themselves up as gods. The Sunday night meeting… it became worship. The virus made everyone want to believe. They used every trick in the book to set themselves up as gods and everyone worshipped them."
"Almost everyone. It only barely worked on me. It didn't work at all on my sister. We couldn't understand what was happening to everyone else. It was crazy. I tried to run away when I was eleven. They caught me – beat me. My mom and dad just watched. I tried again, and the prophet and his disciples beat me within an inch of my life. I tried to stab one of them with a fork, once, and they whipped me half to death, left me tied to a fencepost all night, burnt me with cigarettes." The memories were brutal and painful. Kade lived them with her. Sam was numb to it. Tears streamed down his face.
"After that they kept a close eye on me. They didn't let me near any phones, any terminals, any knives. They used those people as cattle. Took their money. Took whatever women they wanted. Beat up the men for sport." She remembered it. Living in hell. In a prison camp. She knew it wasn't supposed to be this way.
"They started using me when I was twelve."
Kade moaned with the memory of it. Sam just stared off into space.
"I fought the first few times." She'd clawed them, bitten at them, lashed out like a wild animal. "But they always won. It hurt less if I just let them." The pain and humiliation of surrender – of submission. The disgust of it. The self-loathing.
"After that… I just gave in. I just started pretending that the virus worked on me. I told Ana to do the same." The act of dewy innocence. The complete submission to any request, any authority, the feigned enthusiasm at the Sunday night rallies. It killed Kade. The tears kept flowing. He was sending Sam love and compassion, not for the adult her, but for that twelve year-old child, helpless and alone and abused, utterly abandoned by the world.
"I went two years that way. I thought about killing myself every day. I thought about killing one of them every day. What kept me going was Ana." Her sweet sister, also unaffected by the virus, confused, hurt, scared. How Sam had tried to comfort her, hold her, raise her, shield her, protect her, show her some small bit of joy in this godforsaken place.
"It changed when I was fourteen. I'd gotten used to the abuse. I only got hurt when one of them was in a bad mood. Then one day, I was taking a walk with Ana, and one of them saw us, and he had this look, this leer on his face, and I was so used to that, and I didn't care anymore what they did to me. But then I realized he wasn't leering at me. He was leering at my little sister. And I thought, oh my god, if any of them touch you I'm going to kill them all, every one of them, with my own bare hands."
She was crying again. The numbness was gone. Old rage and fear and impotence replaced it. She could be numb about the pain she'd endured. Not about her fears for her sister, for the one innocent human being she'd tried to protect in those years.