Urban Waite - Far Cry - Absolution

She had climbed the ridge hoping to get her bearings, but all she saw was more forest and more hills, mountain after mountain stretching on ahead. Somewhere out there was her brother. All she truly knew about the location of Eden’s Gate was that it rested somewhere along the lake farther on. A place that had been scoured out by glaciers millennia ago, the water deep and the mountains and hills that surrounded it running right down into that blue-green water. But it was still very far from where she was. She looked in the direction she thought Eden’s Gate might be, scanning the ridge she stood upon then running her eyes down along the far side and out into a river valley far below.

Two or three miles on, on the opposite slope from where she stood, she could see the white dots of animals moving in a mountain field. What she thought at first was a herd of mountain goats, now appeared to her as sheep, and as she studied the surrounding grass she saw a man walk out from the edge of the forest and stand watching the sheep then move back beneath the trees.

She stood and took it all in for the better part of five minutes before she picked her way along the ridge and found a small, gradual chute to descend upon the river valley there below.

WILL KEPT A FEW FEET OUT FROM THE BIG TREE TRUNK ANDroot ball of the fir. He circled and looked each footfall over. He saw how she had pressed a knee to the ground at one point and how the edges of the depression showed the slight shift of her movements as, he could only guess, she had hidden behind the large trunk and then moved to peer over it at whoever had pursued her.

“What had she been saying?” Will asked.

Lonny turned to look at him. He was standing off a bit in the place Will had gestured for him to go.

“What was she saying to people in town? What made her come out here?”

“Ugly things,” Lonny said. “That we were murderers. That we were hiding things, that we were keeping secrets.”

“Are we?”

Lonny kept his eyes on Will. He gave a half smile and then turned to look back the way they’d come, as if John might be standing there. “We haven’t done nothing that hasn’t needed to be done. You’ve seen the baptized.”

“I’ve seen it but I’m having a hard time remembering it being done quite that way when the brothers first came up from Georgia,” Will said.

“The Father means to cull the herd. He means to separate the weak from those of us who are strong.”

“And which is Mary May?”

“You know her, don’t you? What would you say?”

“I knew her,” Will said. “But that was a long time ago. That was before I came to Eden’s Gate. I knew her family, too. And I’ve seen her brother, Drew, at Eden’s Gate, but I haven’t spoken more than a few words to him since he joined. I wasn’t there when he was baptized and I guess I don’t know his story. As a kid Drew always seemed to idolize his daddy, Gary, following him around like he was Gary’s own shadow, but Gary was always against Eden’s Gate. I guess for Drew that’s changed.”

“Well,” Lonny said. “Things have changed. Things have changed a good deal even from the time I came up here. Even from the time John invited me up here to this place and told me it would be all milk and honey.”

“But it hasn’t been, has it?”

Lonny looked around at the forest, at the fallen fir tree. “This look like milk and honey to you?” he said. “How long do you think it’ll take before we track her down?”

“I’ll track her as far as I can. But it doesn’t mean we’ll find her. She could get down into a riverbed, or she could travel over rock and not leave any trace. Just cause we’re looking doesn’t mean we’ll find her.”

“Well which way did she go?”

Will looked up, ran his eyes away from the trunk and out among the trees. “She went this way and it looks like she was running.”

“You can tell all that?”

“It’s the spacing of the footfalls,” Will said, rising now and pointing several out. “Catching up to her is going to be no easy task.”

“That right?”

Will walked and kept his eyes down along the ground. He followed Mary May’s path up through the forest. The dun of needles displaced here and there where she’d brought a heel down or pushed off with the toe of her shoe.

The last time he’d seen her she had been a teenager, just old enough to work the bar. But that was a long time ago. A very long time since he’d come to the church and gave his soul over to The Father and divorced himself from all he’d known.

MARY MAY CAME ON THEM JUST AS THEY WERE FINISHING THEIRdinner, and one of them rose now to meet her. He walked out to her from under the tree where they had their fire and their cookpot. She said hello and watched him where he stood. The sun was already in the trees to the west and soon it would be gone all together. Only saying a few words to her in Spanish, he motioned for her to come over and to sit and eat with them.

There were two of them, a father and his teenage son and it had been the father who had invited her to share their dinner. They were eating corn tortillas heated in a pan set by the fire and in the pot simmered a kind of thick stew of meat and beans and spices that smelled of some other world she had not known existed here, but that caused her mouth to water. A bowl was fixed and tortillas given. She sat and ate as they watched her. When she had eaten one tortilla and started on the other, running it around the sides of the bowl and using it to clean the edges, the man asked his son something, then the son spoke to her in English, asking what had brought her here.

“I’m looking for my brother,” she said.

The son told his father then turned and looked at her again. “Is he lost?”

“That’s one way of putting it,” she said. The sheep were grazing the high meadow and she looked out on them and ran her eyes across the country. She was trying to see it all before the light was gone and she marked a notch to the north where she thought she might pass through. When she brought her eyes back to the fire and the herders who sat around it, she asked how far away the Church of Eden’s Gate was from where they were now sitting.

“Está buscando por la iglesia?” the father asked. His face had turned and he was watching her. “Es una mala iglesia.”

Mary May looked from the father to the son and waited for the boy to translate.

“He says it is a bad place,” the son said. “They have tried several times to talk with our employer. They have tried to push him, to get him to give over the sheep and to bring him around to their way of thinking.”

“They have done the same to many,” she said. “They are trying to do the same to me.” She wiped the last of the stew up with the remaining tortilla then folded it and put it to her mouth.

“They come sometimes at night and they take a sheep. They are like wolves. They are thieves and soon, if our employer keeps losing his livestock and the money they produce, he will have no choice but to give them over for the pennies they are offering.”

“The same has been done to me,” she said. “They have turned away alcohol I need for my bar in town, in Fall’s End. They have cut me off from many of my distributors and scared half of them away.”

“They want too much,” the boy said. “They think it all belongs to them. But this land belongs to no one. It is for the people, for the sheep, it is for you to walk across and to go whichever way you please.”

She looked from one to the next then thanked them for the dinner. She stood and handed back the bowl they had given her.

“A dónde vas?” the father asked.