John Gilstrap - Threat warning

Finally, the bitch with the gun told them to turn onto yet another road-paved, but just barely-and then sent them for miles down a lot of nothing, the darkness interrupted only one time by a large house on a hill. At last, they stopped at a heavy-duty gate made of chain link.

“What now?” Mom asked.

“Just wait a second,” the kidnapper said.

Two men seemed to condense out of the black night. They wore black clothing and each carried a rifle that looked like the ones soldiers wore in battle on the news. Flanking the van on both sides, they kept the muzzles pointing to the ground as they approached the car, but their fingers stayed precariously near their triggers. The one on the left used his non-trigger hand to make a whirling motion in the air to tell Mom to roll down the window.

As she did, the nut job in the backseat leaned forward to be seen.

The man in the window smiled. “Sister Colleen,” he said. “Welcome back. I understand you did some excellent work tonight. We’re all very proud.” Turning away from the window, he pulled a flashlight from his belt and flashed it twice at the gate.

Within seconds, another black-clad man with a rifle appeared in the wash of the headlights, approaching from the far side. He removed a padlock from a heavy-duty chain and pulled the gates apart. He and the man at the window both stepped out of the way.

“Go ahead,” Colleen said, using her pistol to point through the fence opening.

As the minivan eased through, Ryan noted through the side-view mirror that their back bumper had barely cleared the fence before the guards were pulling it closed again.

Outside the wash of the headlights, the darkness that surrounded them was near absolute. This part of the roadway wove through trees, but he sensed that the area was more field than forest. In the dim starlight, he thought he could make out the outlines of buildings, but even that was hard to tell. Some distant windows emitted yellow light, but in each case, the light seemed dim.

By the clock on the dash, it took six minutes to cover the distance from the gate to the sturdy block-and-timber building where so-called Sister Colleen told them to stop. This was one of the buildings with lights on, and now that they were close enough, Ryan could tell from the flickering that they were looking at candlelight. Candlelight and a gun-wielding bitch who thought she was a nun. Oh, this was bound to get interesting.

He shot a glance at his Mom. “No electricity?” he asked.

She didn’t answer. Maybe it was just that obvious.

“Turn off the lights and the car,” said Sister Colleen.

Their world went blacker still.

The front door to the house opened, spilling a parallelogram of light across the porch and onto the ground. Two shadows filled the space almost immediately. Both were maybe six feet tall and athletic looking, though Ryan categorized the one on the right as football-athletic, and the one on the left as soccer-athletic. Neither appeared older than twenty. They each carried an old-fashioned oil lamp, the kind with a hurricane globe around the wick and handle on the top-Ryan associated them with movies about old-time railroads-and pistols in holsters on their belts. As they approached, Colleen opened the sliding door, introducing a blast of frigid air.

“Everybody out,” she said. “And please don’t give us reason to hurt you.”

Ryan did as he was told, pausing to grab his coat from the floor and put it on.

“Good idea,” Colleen said. “You’ll want to have your coats with you. It can get chilly at night.”

The one who looked like a football player looked even bigger up close.

“The mission went perfectly,” Colleen announced. “This is the Nasbe family.”

Football held his lamp high and peered through its shadow for better view. He looked each of them in the eye, and smiled. He exchanged nods with the other lamp bearer. “Perfect indeed,” he said. “I am Brother Stephen. This is Brother Zebediah, and you have already met Sister Colleen. Gather closer together.” He made a gathering motion with his hands, sort of like a stiff-armed clap, but without actually clapping.

Ryan sidestepped closer to his mom’s right.

“I have always believed that honesty is the best policy,” Brother Stephen said. He continued to hold the lantern high, and as he spoke, clouds of condensed breath occasionally obscured his face. “You should know that you are prisoners, and that Brother Zebediah and Sister Colleen and I are your jailers.”

Christyne’s hand gripped Ryan’s arm.

“If you behave and do as you are told, your life will be tolerable. If you cause trouble, your life will be hellish, and perhaps unnecessarily short.” He paused for effect. “I know you have questions-you’d be foolish not to-but I won’t be answering any of them. Consider yourselves fortunate that on a night when so many others died in their cars, you are still alive. Follow me inside now.”

Christyne hesitated. Ryan saw tears on her cheeks.

That seemed to please Brother Stephen. “What’s your name again?” he asked.

“C-Christyne.”

“Do I scare you, C-Christyne?” he reproduced her stammer perfectly.

She nodded.

He gave a little smile and cocked his head. “Good,” he said. “It’s good to be scared of me. The idea of hurting a pretty lady like you actually turns me on, know what I mean?” He rubbed his crotch.

“That’s enough, Brother Stephen,” Sister Colleen snapped.

He ignored the rebuke and maintained his eye contact with Christyne. “Be very, very afraid of me.” He stood, and turned his attention to Ryan. “I’ll even let you watch.”

Ryan lunged without thinking, and Brother Stephen stopped him with a punch to the center of his chest. Just like that, his breath was driven from his lungs, and he found himself struggling to get it back.

“You a tough guy, little man?” Brother Stephen asked with a grin.

Christyne moved instantly to intervene, pulling Ryan behind her to shelter him with her body. “He didn’t mean anything,” she said. “We’re just both very tired. We’re not thinking straight.”

“Got your mommy to hide behind, eh, little man?” Brother Stephen mocked.

Ryan had never felt this way. He didn’t know what to do. Anger, humiliation, and terror together drove his heart rate to something beyond anything he ever felt on an athletic field.

“Don’t say a word, Ryan,” Mom said.

“Smartest advice you’ll ever hear,” said Brother Stephen. “You just do what she says, do what I say, and I won’t have to cripple you.”

“For crying out loud,” Sister Colleen said.

Brother Stephen leaned in closer to the boy, silently emphasizing the five inches in height and eighty pounds in weight that separated them. “But any time you want to go a round with me, you just let me know.”

Ryan struggled to find words to say, something cool that might help him resurrect some measure of honor. But he was simply too terrified to make his voice work.

“Inside now,” Brother Stephen instructed. “Both of you.”

Sister Colleen led the way. The front door opened into the middle of the house, in the center of what appeared in the dim light to be one big room constructed of hewn timbers-like a log cabin, but without the mud crap between the logs. The inside dimensions were smaller than the outside dimensions, though, leading Ryan to believe that there must be additional wings on the sides, accessible, he supposed, through doors that hid in the shadows beyond the lamp light.

An army-style cot, made up with a sleeping bag and pillows, sat along the back wall of the main room, just barely visible along the edge of the flickering light. Ryan thought he saw a sink of sorts, positioned under an old-style hand pump. The remnants of a fire glowed in the bottom of a stone fireplace, just behind and to the right of the cot.