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The kid stared.
“You don’t know how old you are, or you don’t want to say?”
Kid stared.
Chuck drove him to the cop shop and waited for Child Protective Services. He got the kid a Coke, and they sat in the foyer while he tried to talk to the boy. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll get you some Cheetos, too, if you’ll tell me your name. Where you live.” Nothing. The kid simply stared and sipped his soda. Chuck bought the Cheetos anyway.
Eventually, a caseworker from CPS showed up, took one look at the kid, and started signing with her hands.
When they stood to leave, the deaf kid gave Chuck Littlefield a hug around the waist and wouldn’t let go. He smelled like sweat and shit and all the unfairness in the world.
After they were gone, Chuck went to the bathroom and wept. The job was like that. You could see a family of five torn apart in a car accident—blood and body parts everywhere—and not so much as flinch. Make jokes about it later, even. Then some small, seemingly random thing would shiv you—like a deaf kid left alone at a homeless encampment—and you’d feel it pierce and scrape all the way to your bones.
That’s what today felt like for Chuck, seeing Lucy, and hearing her old boyfriend tell his story. He’d started out suspicious of Lucy’s ex, and Chuck didn’t quite get this whole escape-to-the-woods business. He could see someplace like Cancun, or Vegas, but to go live in a cabin in the middle of nowhere? Why? But then Kinnick used that wordextinct, and something had clicked for Chuck. When he got sent to Property Crimes, and they pushed him into retirement, Chuck had more than once imagined himself as an old bull, worn down by his battles, kicked out of the herd and sent off to die. In a way, he supposed, Kinnick had done the honorable thing in that situation: going out into the woods alone after you were no longer wanted. But the thought of it filled Chuck with deep sadness. His father had always told him that to be a man was to have responsibilities beyond yourself—to protect those weaker than you, to stand up for what was right. All cop-cynicism aside, for twenty-five years, he’d tried to do that (especially when overtime pay was involved). But then, to be suddenly told your services were simply no longer needed? That your kind wasn’t wanted anymore? That shit was heartbreaking.
And just imagine, like Kinnick, finding yourself looking out at your front porch andnot recognizingyour own grandchildren! That was the ghost of Christmas future for Chuck, who was ten years younger than Kinnick, and had no grandkids yet, but whose children had been poisoned by his bitter ex-wife and spoke to him maybe twice a year. No, he could imagine the same thing happening to him.
All of that explained why he had made what was probably a rash decision: driving straight into the Church of the Blessed Fire’s Idaho stronghold, where the Army of Losers trained for the upcoming holy war against immigrants or the UN or Michelle Obama or whoever the hell they were afraid of (nothing pissed him off more than paranoia; he could never understand these big tough guys being so scared of their own shadows).
The truck eased out of the woods into a clearing below a smallhill. There were stumps everywhere, every tree on the hillside, within a hundred yards of the compound, having been cleared; Chuck assumed this was so invading government agents, or Canadian troops, or space aliens, or whomever couldn’t take cover behind trees. The Rampart compound itself sat at the top of this hill, and was surrounded by a tall, palisade fence—vertical wood posts of varying heights and widths lashed and staked into the ground. It was the sort of fence that might’ve surrounded an old cavalry fort. More signs were nailed to the fence: FEAR THEE THY LORD THY GOD and SEND FOURTH LIGHTNING AND SCATTER THINE ENEMY and BULLSHEVIK-FREE ZONE.
The driveway wound around the palisade fence to a second gate, a swinging eight-foot-high livestock gate, which had also been left open.
“You think they’re expecting us?” Chuck asked. He looked over. Kinnick was pale, and Chuck felt another wave of sympathy for Lucy’s old boyfriend. “Hey, Rhys, if you’re not up for this—”
“No,” Kinnick said quickly, and then, after a breath, “No, let’s do it.” He turned, his face grim determination. “I want to get them out of there.”
“Okay.” Chuck idled the truck just below the gate. “Listen. Don’t worry. I’ve been dealing with asshats like this for thirty years. These guys are like barking dogs on chains. They always back down when you get in their faces. Just remember, this is just a bunch of cement mixers and dishwashers who come out to the woods to playCall of Duty.”
“I’m good,” Kinnick said. “Let’s go.”
Inside the gate were four buildings: a main clapboard house, an upside-down American flag flapping from its back porch; a small white chapel; a red barn with An Appeal to Heaven flag; and what Chuck recognized as the planked bunkhouse, where the Army of Losers slept during overnight drills, or when their mothers wouldn’t let them back into the basements where they lived.
There were a bunch of broken-down vehicles and farm equipment,and angle-parked next to the bunkhouse, three pickup trucks, a Toyota Tercel, and a motorcycle. Chuck parked between the house and the chapel. He turned the truck off. “Wait here,” he told Kinnick.
“And the thing in the glove box?” Rhys said, his voice nervous and high. He couldn’t evensaythe wordgun.
“The box is unlocked,” Chuck said. “But don’t worry about it. And don’t do anything unless I tell you to do something.”
“Okay. Is there a signal, or—”
“The signal will be me saying ‘Rhys, get the fucking gun out now.’?”
Kinnick laughed, a nice release for them both. Chuck opened the driver’s-side door and stepped out. Gravel crunched beneath his feet. Clouds strobed the sun’s harsh light, in and out, then back in.
Between the house and the church was a five-foot hymn board with a badge-shaped sign nailed to it—the sort of thing a different church might have used to alert believers to the songs being sung during that day’s services. On one side, Chuck read this:
Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee. Psalm 91: 5–7
“The word of the Lord,” Chuck said. He’d been raised by an occasionally devout, often-exhausted Catholic mother, who stopped taking her five kids to mass when Chuck was about ten. But such phrases still popped into his head whenever he encountered religion—or whatever this was. “Peace be with you,” he muttered, and he walked around to the other side of the hymn board and read this:
Blessing of the Week: When the communist groomers send in the military to control the people, remember this. The LordThy God has His Soldiers in their midst. Top per capita US military enlistees by state: Georgia, South Carolina, Idaho, Alaska, Texas. Be not afraid, for when the Blue Helmets come across the border to rape and kidnap and kill believers, these brave men touched by the Lord shall fight alongside you.
Chuck let out a deep breath. “Well, okay, then.”
“You just missed them!”
He turned around. A young woman had come out of the chapel. She was maybe twenty-five, freckled, in a long prairie dress, brown-rimmed glasses, hair tied back in a bun.