Urban Waite
For the fans who make this real
PROLOGUE
The harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels.
THE SHERIFF CAME IN AND SAT IN HIS CHAIR. HE TOOK OFF HIS hat, put up his feet, and looked across the desk at her. “What’s this all about?” he said.
“You know what this is about,” Mary May said. “I just want to know what you’re going to do about it?”
The sheriff fingered the band of his hat, picked something off the brim and flicked it away. He had been a bull rider at one point and Mary May remembered him from when she had been a girl. Daddy and Mamma had brought her and her brother, Drew, to see this man ride. The man had been skinny then, and young. She had stood at the edge of the railing and watched him come out of the gates. They had hollered at him to stay on as he rode out into the center with the dirt kicking up under the bull and the man bouncing atop, barely able to hold on. He had seemed fearless in that moment. He had seemed like some sort of hero, but he did not seem like that now.
He tossed the hat on the table, took his feet down from the desk, and looked her straight in the eye. “Shit, Mary May, you know I can’t do a thing about it. You know it wasn’t nothing but an accident and even if it wasn’t there’s not a goddamn thing to be done.”
“An accident? Daddy went out there to get Drew. Forty some years of driving trucks, his and anyone’s he worked for, and he never even put a scratch on one of them. Now you’re calling it an accident?”
“I’m sorry for your loss, but there’s nothing that can be done.”
She looked at him sitting there. She could see the genuine compassion in his eyes and she felt saddened for him because she knew that what he was saying was true. “You think they’re ever going to push you too far? You think they’re ever just going to push you so far you fall off the edge?”
“What are we talking about here?”
She smiled. She ran her eyes around the office and then back to the desk where his hat was sitting on the wood between them. She would turn thirty years old that fall. She had lost nearly all that she ever cared about and it seemed like it had happened overnight. The only thing she had left was the bar and the rage that had grown in her. “Drew is still out there,” she said. “I plan on getting him back, or at least telling him our Daddy is dead. That’s what I’m talking about.” She pushed back from the desk and stood. She wore a T-shirt and jeans and her shoulder-length brown hair was tied up behind her head and she could feel the dangerous pulse of the blood tapping away in a vein in her neck, but she had no way of controlling it.
“I went out there once,” he said, his voice stopping her in place, her hand on the metal doorknob of the office door. In the glass above, with the stenciled lettering across the window, she could see him standing now watching her.
“I was invited. They asked me if I’d come sit in on one of their services.”
She turned.
He took a few steps and came around the desk. “We’ve got preppers, we’ve got doomsday freaks, we’ve got whole families of folks living in shacks up in the hills. No power. No water. Grandma and the great-grandkids sleeping three to a bunk while mommy and daddy make more. We’ve got gun nuts. We’ve got bunkers and compounds. We’ve got free thinkers, anarchists, nihilists, democrats, and god knows what else, but I’m telling you, what I saw up there at Eden’s Gate—the conviction they have, the goddamn power they gave to the words of The Father, it was infectious, it got damn near under my skin. And they’re believers, you know? Every one of them. And that’s not to say a bad thing about them, or to question their faith, but I tell you, it scared me more than anything I have yet seen in this life and there’s not a thing I can do about that. Because, you know what, it’s perfectly legal.”
“You practice that?” Mary May asked.
“I tell it to myself every night before bed.”
She turned to the door and opened it. “He’s my brother. He’s all I have left,” she said, and walked out.
MARY MAY WAS HALFWAY UP THE MOUNTAIN WHEN SHE SAW THE white church truck appear in her rearview. It followed her for another five miles. She raised her eyes on it at every turn of the road, watching the far trees and the bend of the asphalt where the road disappeared, but the truck never wavered. Always appearing again from out of the curve and following along as if the two—her red Ford pickup and the white church pickup—had been tethered together with rope, one dragging the other right behind.
She went another mile before she pulled over on the side of the road and turned off the engine. She brought up her father’s old chrome-plated .38 and set it on the dash before her. If there was someone to call she would have done it right then, but there was no one to call and no signal to get in all of Hope County so she waited for the white truck to break from around the last curve.
When the truck pulled into the gravel behind her, she recognized the man sitting in the driver’s seat. John Seed. She had known him for almost half her life and she had, at one time, thought of him as just another human being in this world, but not anymore. He was something dangerous to her and to any that seemed to chance across his way. He and his brothers ran Eden’s Gate and if anyone knew what had happened to her father, or where she might be able to find her brother, it was John Seed.
She watched him push open the door and then stand. He was ten years older than her and near six foot with brown hair and a beard that covered the lower half of his face. In the mirror, she could see how he kept his eyes on her then reached back inside the truck and brought something out of the cab. Mary May thought maybe it was a gun but she could not be sure. He lifted the tail of his shirt and hid away whatever it was. When he walked up to her she had already cracked her window.
“You scared?” John asked.
She looked at him. “Should I be?”
He stood there a few seconds more and then he put a hand out and ran his fingers across the top of her window, his fingertips within the cab. “You got a license for that thing?” he asked, nodding to the gun on the dash, his fingertips lingering on the top of the window before he took them back.
Her eyes went to the gun and then she looked back on John where he’d taken a step back and stood a little way apart from her truck, like maybe he expected her to use it. “It was Daddy’s,” she said.
She watched him. He seemed to be considering what the right response might be. “I was sorry to hear about him,” John said, and she thought, well, that almost sounded human.
“He was coming up here to get Drew when it happened.”
“Is that right?”
“Now I’m coming up to get Drew and tell him to come home.”
“I heard about that, too.”
“You have?”
“Sure,” John said. “I hear all kinds of things from the people I know. I hear you all are still serving alcohol even though we asked you not to. That’s just one of the things I hear.”
She looked at him as if he might be stupid, but she knew very well that he was not. “How do you expect me to keep running a bar with no alcohol?”
“I don’t.”
He said it very matter-of-fact and she knew he meant it. “You know where my brother is?”
“I know where he is. He’s with us.”
“Does he know about Daddy?”
“He knows.”
“You going to let him come down off the mountain?”
“He can come down off the mountain any time it pleases him. I’m not his keeper.”