“Can’t.”
“Final chance,” the voice said.
“Viv, listen to him. Go back.”
Hands grabbed Viv, pulling her toward town. They belonged to Ray, who gripped her tightly, forcing her up the street.
“Get away from me!”
“Make me.” Ray tugged her farther up the street. “Try to hit me. Go ahead. It won’t matter. You can’t hurt me.”
Viv twisted an arm free and swung, punching his shoulder.
“Is that the best you can do?” Ray mocked.
She swung at his jaw.
He dodged it, moving backward.
She pounded his chest. He shifted deeper into town. She punched him again, striking his mouth, his nose. Blood flew. With each blow, he stepped backward. They reached the middle of town and neared the shelter where Amanda and Viv had survived the night. The next time Viv swung, Ray grabbed her arm. When she swung with the other arm, he grabbed that, also. She writhed, trying to get away. Slowly, she lost strength and sank to her knees. Her chest heaved. Her sobs seemed to come from the depth of her soul.
“I’m sorry,” Ray said.
Amanda pulled Viv to her feet. “Come on. You need to lie down.” She helped Viv to the shelter and eased her into it. The snow she’d stuffed into a bottle was now melted. “Here. Drink some water.”
When Viv didn’t respond, Amanda tilted the bottle to her mouth. Water dribbled down Viv’s chin, but Amanda was relieved to see that Viv swallowed most of it.
Need to fill the bottles before the snow’s completely gone, Amanda thought. She put a bottle in each hand and held it under boards from which water trickled. Ray was suddenly next to her, doing the same thing.
She was troubled by his changed behavior. Did he feel guilty? Was he trying to make amends for killing Derrick? But somehow, guilt didn’t seem part of Ray’s nature. The only explanation that made sense to her was that Ray’s alpha-male personality compelled him to challenge any man he encountered, but when his only companions were women, he needed to try to make them like him. If I’m right, I can use that, she thought.
With Ray’s help, she filled seven bottles and retrieved the rubber gloves.
“I need to talk to you,” she said. As Viv lay staring at the roof of the shelter, they avoided Derrick’s body and walked toward the fire. “I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but…” She had trouble saying it. “We need to bury him. If those dogs come back…”
“I found just the place for it.” Ray wiped blood from his mouth and indicated the area outside town where he’d gone the day before.
“What’s over there?”
“Use your GPS receiver and find out. Maybe that’s not the right spot. Check to see if I made a mistake.”
“You know more about these units than I do.”
“Check anyhow.”
She pulled her receiver from her jumpsuit. She turned it on and accessed the coordinates that had been written on the cans of fruit. A red arrow pointed toward the area beyond town.
“It appears to indicate the same place yours does,” Amanda said.
She and Ray walked to a connecting street and headed past more wreckage. As they neared the area, Amanda saw objects the wreckage had concealed.
“They look like…”
“Grave markers,” Ray said.
Fifty yards from town, a collapsed wooden fence marked the boundaries of a cemetery. Scrub grass and sagebrush grew among wooden crosses, gray and cracked, some broken.
The names and dates on the crosses were carved into the decaying wood. Amanda went from grave to grave, managing to decipher the words. “More women and children than men.”
“Because a lot of women died in childbirth back then,” Ray said. “And a lot of kids died from diseases we now treat easily.”
Amanda heard a clatter and spun. Back in town, Viv was dragging boards from the wreckage and stacking them over Derrick’s body.
“She’s tough,” Ray said.
“That’s why the bastard chose us,” Amanda said. “Yesterday, when you found this place, something bothered you. What is it?”
“That line of crosses.”
Amanda read what was carved in the wood. “Peter Bethune. Died June 20, 1899.” She moved along the crosses. “Margaret Logan. June 21, 1899. Edward Baker. June 30, 1899. All in June.”
“Jennifer Morse. July 4, 1899,” Ray said. “Arnold Ryan. July 12, 1899. There are seventeen in a row. Each of them died between June and October of 1899.”
“Seventeen? Dear God,” Amanda said.
“After that, the ground would have frozen. Maybe there were even more deaths that year, but the earth was so hard that the people in town couldn’t dig graves.”
“A place this size. That many deaths so close together. The community must have been in shock.”
“They were indeed,” the voice said through Amanda’s headset.
She tensed.
“Ray guessed correctly,” the Game Master continued. “There were even more deaths before the end of the year. Eight. In those days, when people died after the earth was frozen, they were put in coffins and stored in someone’s barn. In the spring of 1900, when a search party arrived from a town called Cottonwood about a hundred miles away, they found the coffins and the bodies inside them. But that was the only sign of anyone. Over the winter, perhaps on New Year’s Eve, the people of Avalon disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Ray asked.
“Several later search parties were organized, but they didn’t learn anything, either. The townspeople vanished from the face of the earth. Nor did the search parties find the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires. Some religious extremists theorized that on the eve of the new century, the people of Avalon were assumed into heaven.”
“But that’s crazy,” Amanda said.
“Not in context. Focus on the cluster of deaths that began in June. Peter Bethune was killed when lightning struck him as he ran from his wagon to his store. The townspeople were stunned. But after the long drought, the rain was so welcome that their emotions were divided. They treated it almost as a price that needed to be paid. That’s how Reverend Owen Pentecost spoke of it. But then Margaret Logan, age twelve, drowned in a flash flood. She was playing near a swollen creek. The ground collapsed. She was swept away. Then Edward Baker and his wife and two sons died when their home caught fire. A farmer was trampled by his horse. Another child drowned, this time in the lake. A woman was bitten by a rattlesnake. A family mistakenly ate poisonous mushrooms. The litany of disasters seemed endless. The shadow of death hovered over the valley.”
Amanda scanned the line of graves, awed by the suffering they represented.
“Reverend Pentecost told the townspeople that God blessed those who served Him, and God punished those who did not. Something in the hearts and souls of the town was turning God against them. They needed to look inward and examine their consciences. They needed to eradicate the stain of whatever secret sins had earned them God’s disfavor. With each mounting death, the town prayed harder and longer.”
“The pressure would have been almost unbearable,” Amanda said.
Ray peered toward the sky, the direction in which they instinctively addressed the Game Master. “And they just assumed God was responsible? Didn’t it occur to them there might be another explanation?”
“Like what?” the Game Master asked. “Unrelenting bad luck isn’t any better an explanation than God’s disfavor.”
“Like maybe this Reverend Pentecost was somehow involved. The town changed when he arrived.”
“You’re suggesting Reverend Pentecost killed some of those people?”
“How hard would it be to push someone from a hayloft or substitute poisoned mushrooms for safe ones? All Pentecost needed to do was look for an opportunity.”
“Based on yesterday’s events, we know how easily you could have done it,” the voice said.