I let that comment sink in for a moment, but she continued.
“You have joined our mighty huntress energy force,” she said. “We find food for our Lord that he may grow stronger and wiser every day.”
“What kind of food are we talking about?”
She released me with a huge smile. “Whatever he wants. Tigerlily over there can fill you in on what does and does not agree with his enlightened stomach.”
Tigerlily was a heavyset dark-haired girl who shyly waved at me. I waved back and smiled.
“You’ll be journeying with her today,” Starshine said.
“Our Lord desires spaghetti and meatballs,” Tigerlily said, matter-of-factly.
Tigerlily, myself and another woman who called herself Prairie Rose ventured down the hill and scouted other houses.
“You have to be carefully,” Tigerlily said as she loaded a gun. “The spirits are all around us. If we do not respect our life force, they will send us monsters that will either kill us, ravage us or worse—” She paused for dramatic effect. “Steal our Lord’s supper.”
“I can see where that would be truly horrifying,” I said dryly.
We walked maybe half a mile down and came across a ramshackle ranch-style home. “So now we have to travel lower and lower into town,” she said.
Despite her gentle demeanor, she broke open a window with her hands with a surprising amount of brute force. She smiled brightly.
“You first!” she sang.
“What if someone’s in there?” I asked.
“You’re our latest family member,” she said. “Now’s the time to prove if you are meant to stay with us.”
“And if I don’t?”
She shrugged. “Guess I’ll have to kill you. So go find out.”
Carefully, I climbed through the window and broken glass. The house was empty and had sustained a good amount of disaster-related damage. We crept through to the kitchen side of things and poked through all the cupboards. There were things like rice, rotting vegetables and cheese, salsa in a can, some tampons. I stashed those under my shirt while Tigerlily looked frantically from one cabinet to the other.
“There’s nothing here,” she said. “There’s nothing here!”
“Relax,” I said. “Rice, salsa, maybe we can just improvise something.”
“We. Do. Not. Improvise.”
Tigerlily’s face was tight and she talked through her teeth. “Our Lord wants spaghetti and meatballs and that’s what he’s getting!”
She clawed through the storage spaces and did manage to find an old bag of pasta, so that temporarily calmed her down. With nothing else to find, we hiked down to the next house, where once again she smashed a window and made me enter first.
“How long have you been with Darren?” I asked.
“Who?”
“Sorry – uh, our Lord.”
She beamed. “Almost a month. But it feels like forever. Just one big beautiful forever.”
I nodded. “I’ll bet.”
“And don’t try to talk to me about the way things used to be,” she said defensively. “I don’t care, I don’t remember and none of it is important now, anyway.”
“Deal,” I said as I opened a pantry door.
“Some people think it was so great back then, but it’s not,” she said. “We’re much better off now, and I’m so sick of having to defend what I was doing and how I got here. So don’t ask me about it.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
She stood in the middle of the kitchen now, breathing heavily. “My family told me to come home over six months ago and they even sent me money for it. And I didn’t, because no one ever thinks I can do anything on my own. But I can.”
“Of course,” I said. I pulled out a jar. “How does our Lord feel about Alfredo sauce?”
“He didn’t say,” she said. “I had the best job, working at the Circle K. I could drink Mountain Dew and watch TV all day and then my boyfriend asked me to start borrowing from the store, which I did, and then I got caught and fired. I was looking for a job, but no one wants to hire a high school dropout who got fired from the Circle K for stealing!”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “Didn’t you look into getting your GED?”
“I said I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Right,” I said. “Sorry to pry.”
She hoisted herself up onto the counter and continued to talk.
“You know what really burns me, though?” she asked. “My sister thinks she’s so special because she got three kids and lives in Utah. What’s so special about that? She’s been engaged three times. Who fucking cares?”
I shrugged and kept zeroing in on what sat on the shelves. “There’s rolls down here, but they might be a little stale.”
“You keep looking and you keep looking now!” she said. Her crunchy hippie persona was long, long gone at this point.
Eventually, we made it back to the house with merely a half bag of pasta and a jar of Alfredo sauce to show for our efforts. I had, however, learned plenty about Tigerlily, despite her insistence that she had nothing to talk about and was an absolute closed book on the subject of her background. I learned she had a seven-year-old daughter she hadn’t seen in six years, and she was pretty proud of her job at Circle K.
“I used to deal drugs with my ex, but that was awful, so don’t ask me about.”
“Okay.”
“You meet a lot of bad people selling and buying drugs. I don’t want to talk about it, but this one time, this guy stole my Led Zeppelin sweatshirt and never gave it back.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Stop asking me about it!”
“Tigerlily,” I said. “How has Darren, I mean, our Lord, made things better? I watched him eat those closest to me. Although it’s good to see that Priscilla’s okay.”
“Who?”
“Mountain Spring. It just seems odd that no one is fazed by the fact that your Lord thinks eating people is fine.”
Tigerlily’s face turned an eerie calm and her voice became quiet and smooth. “He’s wonderful. He tells us stories, gives us important life lessons and provides us with food and shelter. He’s not only the leader of us but the rightful leader of the world. He’s currently writing a manifesto that will bring harmony to all nations.”
“Harmony being terrorizing small communities?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she was flippant. “He inspires us everyday to rebuild things better than the way we were given them.”
We walked up the road as I took in the various tributes to Darren along the way. His initials were carved out in trees and someone had tried to position rocks on the ground in the shape of his face.
“How do you know he’s not just using you?” I said.
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”
“You know how people are given power and abuse it? There are some people who have no real interest in helping others.” I let my voice trail off. “You know what, it’ll probably be different for him. As long as he doesn’t promise to bring in a chosen baby or something.”
“He’s wants one!” she snapped. “He just needs to find the right mate and he will bear a Messiah.”
We were almost at the house now.
“So is this mate application still open for interviews or has he picked his candidate?”
Tigerlily grabbed the door and went to open it. “It’s going to be me. He just needs some convincing.”
“Good,” I said. “Because that’d just be embarrassing for him if he asked me.”
She pushed her way in ahead of me and let the door slam in my face.
Later that night dinner was served, Alfredo on pasta with meatballs, by a tense staff. I didn’t ask where the meatballs came from. I knew enough about this guy to know that one shouldn’t ask for fear of being nauseatingly disturbed. Meanwhile, someone served Darren his meal in the dining room while the rest of us stood at attention, our backs to the walls.