She glared at him. “Don’t you dare touch me,” she spat out. “I wouldn’t have a child with you if you were the last person on earth.”
The stunned silence of a few moments previous was nothing compared to the cessation of sound that suddenly descended upon the room. No one spoke, no one dared breathe, and for several shocked seconds there was utter quiet. No one had ever talked back to Father before, no one had ever addressed him with such disrespect, and the fear among the spectators was palpable. None of them knew what Father would do.
Joan was afraid, too, but she was also angry. Not just angry. Furious. Furious at the way she had been brought here, furious at the way she’d been raised, furious at the way the people here were treated and, perhaps most of all, furious at what had been done to her mother. Boldly, she stared back at him, fists clenched, chin held high.
Father exploded. He lashed out and struck Joan across the face, not with an open palm but with a fist. The force slammed her head sideways, and an eruption of pain engulfed her senses. For several seconds she could neither see nor hear. Then blurred vision returned, along with a dull roaring that came from inside her head and muffled all outside sound. She felt wetness on her cheeks, and for a brief, disorienting moment thought his hand had been covered with water when he hit her. Then she realized that the wetness was blood.
A punch to the stomach dropped her to the floor, where she curled onto her side, gasping for breath. Through her tears, she peered up at Kara, but her roommate studiously avoided looking at her, concentrating her gaze on the far wall.
“You will have my child,” Father snarled, and this time he spoke in the Language so Kara couldn’t understand. “I will take you again and again and again and again until you deliver to me the son that was promised.”
Joan searched the faces above her, the faces of the people Father had gathered to watch, looking for support, looking for sympathy, but she saw only uninterested stares and the vacant equanimity of true believers. She would receive no aid or help here.
“Remove her,” Father ordered, and strong hands grabbed her arms, yanking her up. It was still hard to breathe, though the wild agony of a few moments before had settled into a pulsing throb in her head. She closed her eyes against the pain and felt herself being dragged away, out of the room, though she could not tell by whom. At first she tried passive resistance, letting them pull her, but the pressure of the fingers digging into her arms became too much, and she was forced to support herself, stumbling on rubbery feet in whatever direction they led.
She was shoved into a room, where she fell forward, collapsing onto the hard wooden floor. Not a word was spoken, and the only sounds she heard were the slamming of the door followed by the click of the lock. She lay there, unmoving, grateful for the respite. After Father’s assault and the rough treatment of her escorts, lying unmolested on the floor felt like being in a comfortable bed. She turned her head to the side, closing her eyes. The coolness of the wood felt soothing against her face. Gradually, her tears went away and her breathing returned to normal. The pain subsided, though her left cheek and the area around her left eye felt puffy and swollen.
What was she going to do now? Joan wondered.
What was going to be done to her?
She didn’t even want to think about that.
She sat up slowly, looking around. Where was she? The Home must have changed a lot in her absence, or she had forgotten or blocked out much of what she’d known about the place, or perhaps the life she had lived here had been so proscribed that huge areas had been off-limits, because this was another room that seemed completely unfamiliar to her. The shape of the room was odd, almost circular, though there were still four recognizable corners, blunted as they might be. The curved, windowless walls, entirely free of adornment or decoration, were made of a different material than she had seen in the rest of the Home: not wood, not concrete, but a tan spongy-looking substance that resembled foam rubber. Illumination came from a series of small slitlike skylights overhead.
In the center of the room were two large rectangular wooden boxes on sawhorses. Made of simple, unstained, unadorned pine, the boxes resembled coffins, and Joan knew instantly that that was exactly what they were. Attendance at funerals had been mandatory when she was a child, but somehow her parents had managed to keep her from that. So she had never actually seen a coffin here before. But she recognized the work, recognized the style, and she thought it was just like Father to lock her up in a room with coffins as part of an effort to intimidate her.
What was she supposed to take from this? That if she did not cooperate she would die?
A new thought occurred to her: maybe there were dead bodies in the boxes. She would not put that past Father, either, and she walked slowly forward to check.
She reached the coffins.
Peered down.
And saw what had happened to her parents.
Twenty
Bitterweed, Texas, was prettier than its name had led them to expect. Gary had imagined a dusty little town on a flat expanse of dirt, kind of like the one in the movie The Last Picture Show. But it was more like a small town on television: quaint buildings nestled between large, leafy trees, a river running under a bridge on the highway at the beginning of the business district. Old-fashioned streetlamps, two to a block, staved off the darkness and cast the entire community in a warm glow, even now in the wee hours of the morning.
As promised, they stopped by the sheriff’s office first. Gary wouldn’t have expected it to be open at this hour in a town this small, but lights were on as Brian pulled next to the curb in front of the tan brick building. The four of them got out of the car, and Reyn pulled open the glass door. It was unlocked, and a cheap buzzer sounded as they walked inside.
“Is this a police station or a Seven-Eleven?” Brian muttered.
A deputy was sitting behind an old oak desk, playing Tetris on a computer located atop an adjacent cart. He glanced up as they entered and said in a thick Texas accent, “Are you from California?”
Gary looked at his friends. “Yeah,” he said.
“The sheriff wants to see you. Hold on, I’ll find out if he’s awake.” The deputy disappeared through an open doorway into a hallway that led to the rear of the building. “Come on back!” he called seconds later. Glancing silently at one another, Gary and his friends walked around the desk and down the hall to where the deputy stood outside an office, motioning for them to enter.
Sheriff Stewart was as far from the stereotype of a small-town Texas sheriff as it was possible to get. Rather than a corpulent redneck in mirrored shades, he was a slender black man with a soul patch beneath his lower lip. He’d obviously been dozing on the worn couch that sat against one wall of his office, and he yawned as they walked in. “Sorry,” he said, and he had no Texas accent at all. “Not much happens here after the bars close, and I was just getting in a little dreamtime before the morning rush.” He held out a hand. “I’m Antwon Stewart, sheriff of Camino County. My associate here is Taylor Lee Hubbard, the best deputy on the planet Earth.”
The four of them shook hands and introduced themselves. Though there didn’t seem to be anyone else in the station, the sheriff indicated to the deputy that he should close the door, and he did so, standing with the rest of them in front of the sheriff.
“I understand that you think one of your friends has been kidnapped by the Homesteaders,” Stewart said.
“My girlfriend. Joan Daniels,” Gary answered. “And I don’t think so; I know so. We captured two of them who’d been sent after me, and they told us where she was. That’s why we’re here.”