Urban Waite - Far Cry - Absolution

He came back to her now, the drug fading a bit and she saw it was John there before her and not her father. He held her hands again. She was scared not because of where she was or who she was with. She was scared of the words he used and the way they had begun to seep inside her and bend and harden like scaffolding meant to support and soon overtake her very being.

“I am glad,” John said. “I am glad Bliss has released in you this path to a truer understanding.” He guided her hands now to where her collar was and he began to pull with her hands in his, ripping the material of the collar until she felt the bare skin of her flesh come exposed in the dead air. “Your sin will go here above your breasts, and it will be a mark for you to remember us by. You will have many days and nights to think on it, and in the end you will find there is only one conclusion, and that conclusion will be that you will join us here, giving up your sin, and your life beyond. But first we must prepare you. We must wash you clean, for your sin is envy, and it will be placed upon you for all to see.”

WILL LET HIMSELF IN THROUGH THE FAR DOOR THEN STOODlooking down the long hallway with the overhead lights in cages every ten feet or so, six of them in total and the doors of the rooms beneath each. He had not been here in years, but he had not forgotten this place. He knew where the room was, and where his own tattoo had long ago been stapled to the wall. He knew this was where they would take Mary May. He knew it because he had once been taken there himself.

He had gone only a couple of steps down the hall when he heard the opening of a door. He came to a dead stop and then, thinking fast, he ducked into the nearest room. With the blackness of the room behind he stood there with the door just cracked and a slivered view of the hallway before him. He wondered what would happen if he was caught here, whether they would be able to see he had lost the faith. He wondered whether it was that obvious, and whether they would have come to his own house to write the word SINNER upon his walls.

In what little light there was Will slid the rifle bolt down and checked the chamber, then carefully pushed it back into place. He listened to the soles of heavy booted feet pass by then fade again.

Will cracked the door a little then eased out. Going down the hall was Drew. Will watched him walk, his movements almost robotic. Each step labored and deliberate, one in front of the other all the way to the end, where he let himself back out into the light of day.

When Will heard the door close, he went again into the hallway. Will had not liked what he had seen and he wondered now why Drew was not with Mary May. Will started to doubt himself, but he also feared for Mary May all the more.

He held the rifle out before him and began to walk in the direction Drew had come from, heel then toe, the rubber beneath his boots softly echoing. If she was here she was down this hallway. He looked ahead and continued, his eyes fixed now on where he thought she’d be.

There was a creak of door hinges then the sound of footsteps up ahead. A voice was heard suddenly. A voice Will knew was John’s.

Will moved fast. He took three steps, trying to keep the sound of his own boot soles hidden. The inlaid shadow of a door sat before him, and he ducked in just as he saw John come into sight fifty feet ahead. He was talking to someone, but Will’s own pulse had begun to beat so fast and loud in the channels of his head that he could hear nothing. He had felt this way before. With the big boar grizzly, with his own wife and child, and before all that he had felt this in the war. Now he tried to push this feeling down away from him and loosen its grip from around his skin.

When he bent and looked again around the inlay of the door, John had turned and moved away in the opposite direction. Will saw him open a new door and then disappear within. Will was out and moving down the hallway. His heart still beat inside of him with a thump that shook the skin, but he kept going. He moved because he had to, because he thought there might not be another time. If he was going to save Mary May this was the only time. He only hoped now that he would find her and that whatever had happened to her, wherever she was in the process, was not now at its end.

He came down the hallway with the same fast and silent steps. He reached the door that held the sins within, and he turned the knob now and pulled it open. Mary May was there before him, kneeling on the floor five feet in. Her eyes were glassy and almost nonresponsive as he moved to her and tried to bring her to her feet. The collar of her shirt had been ripped and pulled aside and he could see the beginning of her bra and the naked upper skin of her breastbone. He tried now to gather the material up, to somehow help her.

“Mary May,” he said, whispering to her then turning to look behind him. He had left the door open and he felt the cool air of the hall flowing in like a ghost unseen. He turned back to her, he tried to bring her up and to get her on her feet but she was unmoving. He snapped his fingers in front of her. “Mary May, you need to help me. We need to go. We need to get you out of here. We need to get away from here. You don’t know the things they do.”

She turned her head slightly, and then she met his eyes. “Are you up there?” she asked.

He was watching her. Mary May’s eyes swam beneath her lids like something come loose from all that anchored them, but her voice had stunned him for a moment with how clear and deliberate she had made it sound. He turned again and looked behind him and when he came back to her, he said, “I can lift you. I can lift you out of here and carry you over my shoulder. But if you can walk and help me it would be better. We may need to fight to get out of here. We may need to run and I don’t know if we will get away if it comes down to that.”

Her eyes washed past him now. He tried to meet them as they went. He watched her head roll to the side then turn upward on the wall. “Are you up there, Will? Are you there on that wall with all the rest?”

“Jesus,” Will said. “What did they give you?”

“Are you up there?” she asked again.

“Yes,” he said. He looked around wildly, desperate to escape and knowing if he was found here that it could get no worse. “Can you help me? Can you help me get you out of here?” He did not wait for a response, he bent and lifted, getting her over his shoulder like some backwoods kill. He turned around and began to move for the door but she stopped him.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t take me.”

“What?”

“Don’t take me. Put me down.”

He paused at the doorway, cautious, not wanting to be seen. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

“John is only going to tattoo me,” she said. “I came to get my brother. I came for Drew.”

He didn’t want to listen. He didn’t want to hear what she had to say, but he knew even with whatever drug they’d given her, he knew what she was asking him to do.

“Put me back,” she said again. “Put me back exactly as you found me.” Her voice was so deliberate. Each syllable defined and clear. “If my family ever meant anything to you, put me down.”

He turned and set her down.

She looked up at him. She watched his face as he stood watching hers. “Drew is at the house where they put me last night. He is waiting there. Do you know it?”

She was drugged and he could see it in every movement she made. But there was clarity there, too, like someone surfacing from a coma for a single moment before they were lost again. “Yes,” Will said. “I can find it.”

“I think they killed my father,” she said. She said it almost as if it was an afterthought, but he knew it was not. He knew she had been thinking about it all along. “You need to be careful,” she said. “I came to get my brother and I came to get him out of here. It’s what my daddy wanted. Can you do that for me, Will? You were always one of Daddy’s favorites. You were always missed even though we knew you were not gone. Not really.”