A sallow light bulb beams down on the pews. There are seven men milling around the sanctuary, three sitting and four standing. One is Morgan Schembari, who’s on the phone. One is Dick Underwood, wearing fatigues and black boots, an American flag patch on one shoulder, rifle slung around the other. Another man is taking pictures with his phone, and what they’re taking pictures of—your mind can’t quite wrap around it at first.
Ginna Andrade is naked and sitting up in the front pew, her breasts drooping, her legs splayed. There is an ugly wound on the front of her head and blood draining into her bullet-scrambled eyes. Two of the men pose with her, grinning. Some of the blood has trickled down her neck and chest. Her clothes lie piled near the pulpit but her socks are still on. They are gray and bunched around her ankles. And yet Ginna made it free of this life well enough compared to her husband. Reverend Andrade sways upside down, dripping. A rope, strung up over one of the ceiling’s joists, has him by the ankles, so that his arms dangle a few feet off the ground. You gag at the sight, hold in the vomit that hurtles to the top of your throat, and continue staring because, again, it’s taking you so long to make sense of what has happened here. He too is naked, but not just naked of his clothes. His skin has been stripped off, cut away with knives, one of which someone has stabbed into the meat of his thigh muscle and another which protrudes from the top of a pew. There are chunks of knotty flesh everywhere and blood pooling beneath the reverend’s wet black hair. Like Raquel’s dogs, his skinless body has a pearlescent sheen. His face is no longer recognizable because they’ve cut off his nose. There’s a hole between his legs where they did the same to his genitals, all these pieces of him stomped by boots and dragged across the same aisle you walk down with your son and wife to pray each week.
Underwood is pacing with his assault rifle. Schembari is talking solemnly into his phone. You recognize another man because he’s wearing a shirt with the sleeves cut off, and you can see the dragon tattoo on his shoulder.
“Now, I was trying to be decent about it, I really was,” says Schembari, rubbing his baldness in exasperation, “but that car still isn’t running right, and we had to send Tyler back home with it.” He waits for a reply. “All right, but just let me know that you’re getting it taken care of, that’s all I’m asking. And make sure he knows that these mechanics, some of them straight up just aren’t worth a single solitary fuck.”
The men finish taking their pictures with Ginna Andrade and crowd around the cameraman to judge the results. No one appears much interested in the body suspended by a rope from the crossbeam. Underwood steps around it like it’s a low-hanging decoration. The man who took the picture, you realize, is a police officer. He once manned a checkpoint and nearly caught you for driving drunk.
“Even if it was a timing belt,” Schembari goes on, “we really needed that other vehicle tonight.”
You realize you haven’t exhaled in nearly a minute and slowly peel your head away from the light. You stand with your back to the wall for a moment, your eyes closed, just breathing. Then carefully and quietly, you make your way back through the hall, the reverend’s office, and the basement. Out into the night, you take a wide berth through the woods until you’re sure you’re clear of the man in the balaclava sitting in the car.
Then you run. As hard and fast as you’ve ever run in your life.
A vortex has opened, and at its entrance, at the end of all possible things, there is a constellation of all the souls that ever were or will be. Every spirit must travel this path and into this dark wound. You try to take solace in that. As you drive through the night, your son asleep, your wife peeling her nails apart in silent terror, you try to remind yourself that what you saw in the church, a version of such a fate, the fear, the unknowing, the violence, awaits everybody. It is all too normal.
The highway is empty at this hour, but you sweat every pair of headlights in your rearview and white-knuckle the wheel until the vehicle passes. You try to keep it under ninety in case there are any state troopers not yet laid off still looking to write a ticket. You didn’t need to do any begging to get Casey to lend you the truck. Simply took him out of the diner and told him what you saw. You just needed to get your family safe and told him exactly where he could pick it up.
Bombing through the darkness, the truck shuddering with speed, it’s two and a half hours to Dayton. You do see one bizarre thing, this billboard, awash in light. Its panels are slightly skewed as if pasted up hastily before the rogue artists fled. Blue lettering on a black background, and all it says is:
KATE MORRIS IS ALIVE AND WILD
It’s another fifty minutes to Trotwood. Your mom’s place is the same lawn well kept, same flower boxes beneath the windows, same American flag above the porch, same junked neighborhood. She’s of course surprised to see you and the family.
“What’s going on, Johnny?” she asks as Raquel takes Toby back to your old bedroom to put him to sleep, reassuring him that things are not as scary as they seem right now.
“Too much to explain. Things got bad in Coshocton. We had to leave.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“Yeah, Mom, in the middle of the night.” You check the time on the microwave: 4:25 a.m. It’s got to be at least three hours to the plaza at the tiptop of the state. “And I gotta get going.”
“What are you talking about?” Raquel has come back into the room. Her eyes are bloodshot, her hair a starchy mess. “Where you going?” she asks. “Middle of the night, and where the hell you gotta be?”
“It’s that job, I told you.”
“Now?”
“It’s gotta be now.”
“No.” She shakes her head furiously. “No. You need to stay here with me and your son—”
You take her hand. Into it, you slip the scrap of paper with the account number and the password.
“Don’t lose this. It’s only fifty dollars now, but soon it’s gonna be nine grand. Then it’ll keep going up until it reaches fifty thousand. Whatever you do, do not lose this.”
Instead of looking happy, she starts crying. “Keeper, please. Baby, you’re scaring the hell out of me.” She puts her palms on the back of your head to cradle your skull. You kiss the hot brown skin beneath her eyes and hate yourself for being unable to protect her. “Please tell me what’s happening.”
“Just in case. I want you to have it just in case.”