Urban Waite - Far Cry - Absolution

All he’d done that day could not be changed and he felt helpless. People had died because of him, and at his hand, and though he knew it had been them or him, he could in some way still not accept it. He had thought all of this long behind him.

It came rushing at him now. Who he’d been in war and after, when he’d come home. Who he was now—who time and regret had made him. The deaths of his wife and daughter felt to him like a wound that would never close. The man he’d become because of them. The part he’d played in all of this. He couldn’t look away anymore. He couldn’t just hide and hope it all went away. He knew he was doing something now. He hoped it was enough for absolution. He hoped somehow that this was what he needed to do to earn his forgiveness from God, or from whatever being out there decided his fate one way or another. He had caused so much pain and done so little to redeem himself. He hoped this was enough.

He looked over at Drew, who was watching him in all this. In all of Will’s raw anguish. The thoughts going around in Will’s head that seemed to have exploded from out of the depths of his mind and then seeped like oil through every crevice. He wondered if he was losing it. He was so tired. So very tired and once more he felt something move inside of him and come loose and he coughed it up and stood looking at it on the ground, a clot of blood that was the size and shape of a golf ball. An ulcer surely grown in his stomach—a physical manifestation of his own fears and doubts concerning Eden’s Gate.

He looked at Drew again. The man’s eyes fixed on him, a look of disgust across his face. Will’s head swam and he nearly fainted except he knew he couldn’t. It was only the sound of car tires now that kept him from passing out. Then, from somewhere down the road, he heard the racing of an engine. He took the shotgun from the man who now was dead and Will lay there with the stock braced across the man’s chest and the barrel pointed down the road. He had little will to move and he waited now to see who would come, knowing he would fight if it came down to it, that he would use each and every shell.

W HEN WILL WOKE THE SKY WAS A PALE BLUE LIKE THATseen only within three or four nights of the fullest moon. He had fallen asleep with his head resting against the rear passenger window of the Oldsmobile. He sat up and felt every one of his muscles unhinge like some old rusted bit of metal long forgotten by the light of day. He saw he was alone but for Mary May who, like him, lay with her head against the front passenger window. Jerome was missing from the driver’s seat and so, too, was Drew.

Will looked around now and found at his feet the flak jacket and the shotgun he had taken off the dead man and brought with him into the car. His rifle sat up front with Mary May and he leaned now and looked to where it rested across her knees. There was a dread rising in him that he was alone, that Jerome or Drew might now be taken and Mary May in her unmoving slumber might actually be very dead.

With one hand Will brought a finger across her neck and pressed it to the skin. The warmth he felt was immediate, and there beneath his fingers was the pulsing of the blood within the vein. He brought his hand back and looked out into the blue night. Fields stretched out for some length and the farmhouses among them, some with no lights to see, but others glowing faintly from behind the soft curtain of a window.

He cracked the door and took with him the shotgun then carefully closed the door again and stood upon the grass margin of a dirt road. Jerome had parked the car atop a dike. Will could see to either side the flatness of the fields and the way the moon fell across the land, leaving little left in shadow.

When Will went to the edge of the dike and looked over, he saw how the slope ran away from him to a stream below. The water rolling past in that glimmer of light was itself a reflection of the sky above that he could see would change nightly based upon the weather and the fullness of the moon. He ran his eyes out and saw where Jerome was standing another hundred or so feet upstream, while to his right, down in the vegetation sat Drew.

Will could hear nothing of what they said but he could see them both staring off across the river at a group of four horses there across the way. Will moved down the road then stopped and gave a last look to the Oldsmobile there before heading down the slope toward the water below. When he came within five feet of them they turned and followed his movements until he stood beside Jerome.

“Beautiful creatures,” Jerome said. His eyes were on the horses across the stream. The animals standing four abreast with their heads held outward over the wire fencing. Each bending from time to time to eat from the tall shoots of grass that had been cultivated to gigantic proportion from the water there.

Will looked at the horses, then he looked to Jerome. He bent and leaned out and took in Drew where he sat with his hands still tied behind his back, but, as Will saw now, no cord around his mouth or even around his ankles. “You’re taking chances with him you shouldn’t take,” Will said.

“He worshipped once in my church and I have not forgotten that.”

“Yeah, well I wouldn’t be so sure he remembers it the way you do,” Will said. He ran a hand down his cheek and felt the gouges left there by Drew’s nails. “You really should be careful.”

Jerome flashed the chrome .38 he carried in his off hand then looked to Drew and back to Will. “It’s not hard to forget what we’re dealing with. Especially with the way this one talks.”

“He’s been giving you the gospel?”

“They always seem to,” Jerome said. “It’s like they never read another book or heard another voice than that of The Father or that book of his he calls his bible. They all hide behind it, even Drew.”

“And you?”

“Me?”

“How is your religion any different?”

“I’m not forcing it on anyone,” Jerome said. “I’m here as an interpreter. And sometimes, even to me, the Bible is a foreign text. I’m not the end-all. I’m nothing like that and neither is God. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, whether God is with you or whether God is not. I don’t make excuses otherwise.”

“Sounds like you’ve been down here having some discussion.”

“I wouldn’t call it that.”

“What would you call it then?”

“I’d say we’re at an impasse.”

Will ran his eyes over Drew. He was watching the horses but Will could tell he was listening, too. “What’s he say?” Will asked Jerome.

“He says there’s nowhere we can go that Eden’s Gate can’t follow us, and he says wherever we go, and to whoever we find that might help us, their lives are forfeit. He says John will burn buildings to the ground.”

“John is pleasant that way, isn’t he?”

Jerome was watching the horses, but he turned now and looked at Will. “We can’t take him or Mary May to my church, or to the bar. Both places would be too easy.”