Dark Paths: Apocalypse Riders (2 page)

“Lia,” the minister said, “Lift the back of her shirt.” She did as commanded, feeling guilty the whole time. Guilty for having a hand in what they were doing to Emily; guilty for not at least trying to speak out on the girl’s behalf; and guilty, too, for even wishing to go against Father Speer’s wishes.
This is the price we pay for our safety. We all know it and we’re all willing. Emily included.
She pulled Emily’s shirt up, revealing the skin of her back to the barn. She tucked the shirt’s bottom into her collar so her chest remained covered while her back was exposed. Then she stepped away.

Father Speer pressed the whip into her hands. “Lia was the last to be purified amongst us, and so she is most able to deliver the purification that Emily needs.” She fought the tears that threatened to blur her vision and spill down her cheeks.
You’ve done this before. It will be over fast.
She hated this more than being the one against the wall. “Proceed, Lia.”

“It will be over quickly,” she whispered to Emily before stepping further away. Then, with a motion like swinging a baseball bat, she hit Emily’s back with a loud, echoing
crack!
The other girls jumped at the sound, undoubtedly reliving their own punishments. She struck her with it twice more, quickly, before asking the minister, “How many?” Emily’s soft sobs made her stomach churn.

He thought for a moment. “Four more.”

She delivered them quickly, careful not to aim at the same spot twice. Emily yelped at each strike - Lia was hesitant to hit her too gently, lest Father Speer take over. Her cries were like a whip’s bite on Lia’s heart.
She didn’t deserve this, she didn’t do anything wrong!
Tears ran down her own cheeks before it was over. She must have done a satisfactory job, though - Father Speer inspected the red welts on Emily’s back and nodded his approval.

“Emily has atoned,” he said to the girls. “She is forgiven. Her sin is no more.”

“Her sin is no more,” the girls repeated in low mutters. They filed out silently, sparing her sympathetic glances as she wept against the wall. “Come, Emily,” Father Speer said, stroking her head like a dog. “I will attend to your wounds personally.” Holding her shirt as it was, with the material off her back, she let the minister lead her away. “Dry your tears, Lia. You did Emily a service. It’s nothing to cry over.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. Father Speer shook his head.

“You’re far too sensitive,” he said. “Hopefully it is just your youth showing.”

Lia sank to the floor once he and Emily were gone. Her knees were weak - she would need a moment before she could return to the browning and withered garden.
This sadness will pass
, she told herself.
Just find something to hold onto and it will pass.
It was a lesson from her mother - thinking about her would lead to despair, so she pushed the image away and thought instead of the good times she shared with Emily. She remembered how Emily had laughed at her when she’d tried to teach her how to patch her clothes. Lia was hopeless with a needle. She kept jabbing her own fingers. She held up two bloody index fingers and two bloody thumbs for Emily to inspect, and the girl had laughed and laughed. “Not at you, not really,” she had said, “I just can’t believe anyone can be as bad at this as you are.”

The memory comforted her. She’d ask Emily to teach her again when she was feeling better. She’d stab her own fingers again just to make her laugh and hopefully make her forget the pain.

Finally calmed, she rose from the dusty barn floor. There was work left to do before the sun went down

Father Speer visited Lia that night. She knew that he would - the sight of her big hazel eyes spilling tears always woke the quiet monster in him. She lay on her mattress and waited, trying to still her breathing.
I shouldn’t think of him as a monster,
she told herself,
He has never hurt me. He
saved
me.
But still, she shuddered. Something about his manner when he came to her in the night made her wary. Made her afraid.

She must have dozed. One moment she was staring at the ceiling. The next, she opened her eyes and found him kneeling above her. “Father,” she gasped. He wore a clean white undershirt but was still in his dusty jeans. They all slept half-dressed. They had to in case of danger. “What is it?”

“You cried today,” he said. “I was concerned for you. Concerned you’re becoming weak.”

“I’m not. I promise.”

He stretched out on the floor next to the mattress, lying on his side, his eyes even with the top of her head. He never wanted to look her in the face when they had these late night talks. He always pushed her back when she tried to see his.
Because he knows he’s doing wrong. Part of him knows.
She pushed the thought away though her heart raced.

He rested a hand on her waist. “I know you know how to fight the dead,” he said. “You’re our best shooter. But I’m afraid you won’t fight the living. And they’re the real threat.”
Not all of them. Not Emily! Not your own adopted family!
She bit her tongue. His hand trailed up her waist to rest on her ribs, just below her breasts. His other hand toyed with a lock of her dark hair. “You’re a brave girl, Lia. I know you can be tougher than this. You have to be to survive.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’ll be better.” The words spilled automatically. She’d said them dozens of times before. They were what he wanted to hear.

He sighed contentedly. “I know you will.” His hand traced her ribs, then trailed higher, just brushing the undersides of her breasts. The material of her t-shirt was soft and his fingers were warm. She held her breath. “You’re a good girl, Lia,” he said. “Are you still pure?”

“You know that I am,” she breathed. She couldn’t show any reaction - it would upset him. He’d accuse her of sinful thoughts and intentions. He might even accuse her of touching herself or letting someone else touch her. So though her heart raced with fear and with a warmth that she feared admitting even to herself, she remained still and quiet. He caressed one breast, then the other, his palm heating the fleshy mounds through her shirt. Her nipples grew stiff beneath his wandering hands.

“That’s okay,” he reassured her, “Our bodies betray our hearts, sometimes.” He rolled one between his fingers and she bit back a gasp. “You cannot help this any more than you can make your heart stop beating.” He rolled the other, pinching it tighter between his thumb and forefinger. “I forgive you.”

Lia kept her eyes glued to the ceiling as he spoke. She counted the cracks, as she always did. She inspected it for bugs and spiders as she bit back gasps. She had to distract herself from her body’s desire to lean into his touch. “So beautiful,” he muttered, though he only looked at her with his hand. Then the warmth of them was gone and he was unbuckling his belt, opening his pants. She heard ringing in her ears.
Alarm bells,
she called them. Like tinnitus. The high-pitched sound virtually deafened her - Father Speer kept speaking but his words were drowned out. It didn’t matter - when he opened his pants, he preferred her silence anyway.

She could feel him shifting next to her, moving with a slow rhythm. She watched his throat move with words, his jaw slacken and his chest rise as he took in deep breaths. He nudged her with his knee. She knew what he wanted - wordlessly, she wrapped her hand around his, the one stroking his erection, jutting from his open pants. She wasn’t allowed to touch his skin - somehow that would make her the sinner. That would make it all her fault that he did what he did. She knew the words that spilled from his lips now, though she couldn’t hear them at the moment. She’d heard them uttered enough before. “I’m a sinner, Lia, see? I’m no better than you girls. The base animal within me rears its ugly head again. I’m sorry, Lia, I’m so very sorry…”

Her chest felt tight. She didn’t know why she felt this way - Father Speer had never hurt her when they were like this. He struck out with his words at times, but “purification ritual” aside, he had never harmed her, had never touched her in anger. All she was doing was holding his hand while he stroked himself, faster now, his fingers flexing tighter around his hard member. She didn’t understand where that sense of dread was coming from, why her ears rang and why she felt so distant from herself, why she felt like she was watching everything happen from high above.

A great shudder ran through the minister as he climaxed. He spilled his seed over her hand, hot and thick, and she felt as if she’d been burned. She felt stained. It would be a long while before her hand felt clean again.

He said nothing more. With a grunt and a regretful sigh, he rose and returned upstairs. Slowly, the ringing subsided. She shivered. Though he’d barely touched her at all, she felt ill. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to be touched. Heck, she wanted
more
. Her body craved it even then, even through her feelings of dread and sense of
wrongness.
It was just that hint of an unspoken threat. He might not have even been consciously aware of it himself, not within his madness, with that dark cloud that came over him at times. But sometimes, she worried - he’d saved her life. Did that mean that he
owned
it?

Her thoughts were interrupted by loud knocking on the front door.

She reacted just as she’d been trained to react. The other girls in the corners of the room moved in an identical fashion. She pulled on her heavy black boots. She walked briskly to the chest at the foot of her mattress. There, she pulled out her holster, her pistol and her two revolvers, and her emergency pack. Holster went on, one gun to either side, last gun tucked into the back of her pants, backpack on and buckled across her chest. She heard the other girls’ buckles as well. They’d gotten that far in just moments - Father Speer was descending the stairs just as they were moving out of the room to the kitchen, to the pantry. She knotted her dark hair on top of her head as she stepped inside.

Half the pantry contained cans of food and dried goods. The other contained the larger guns. Lia passed them out one by one. Two each. They’d pass one to Father Speer if he called for one, but he would be well-armed himself beneath his jacket.

They spread out as they heard him open the door; the other two girls took up their positions in the rear of the house. Lia herself circled around to the front where she could see the minister and the open doorway. Making no effort to stay out of sight, she leaned one shotgun against her leg and raised and aimed the other as they continued the minister conversation he had started with the visitor.

“We’ll deal with the corpses,” Father Speer said, “Don’t make us deal with you.”

The man at the door was bearded, tall, and wore a leather jacket. He didn’t look like some starving drifter. She worried for the first time in a long while that they might be in real danger.

“You don’t understand,” the man said. “Have you seen the herds out there? You can shoot all you like and they’ll just keep coming. They’re going to swarm this entire farm and you with it if you don’t get out.” He gestured at Lia. “They’ll eat your daughter alive, do you want that?”

Wrong thing to say.
“Girls!” Father Speer barked. Lia cocked her gun. The heavy metallic sound filled the air as six other girls did the same. If there was a more fearsome sound on the planet she didn’t know it. The man’s eyes went wide and his knees nearly buckled.

“I got it,” he said, voice shaking, showing his palms, “I’m leaving. But I’m telling you-” He stepped backwards onto the porch, his boots heavy on the wooden structure. He raised his voice. “There’s a herd of corpses coming right this way. Hundreds of them. Get out while you can!”

The minister watched him leave. Lia heard the roar of an engine while he stood there in the doorway and was ashamed that the sound hadn’t woken her when the stranger had approached. She didn’t lower her gun. “Father? Should we be worried?”

He shook his head and finally stepped back inside. “Fill your pockets, girls. He’s a stranger and a sinner, but we should be prepared in case he spoke the truth.”

“Hundreds, though?” one of the girls squeaked from the top of the stairs.

“He’s exaggerating,” Father Speer said, though he didn’t sound so sure. “We’ll be okay. But get out the extra ammo and fill your pockets. Now.”

That set them running. He never trusted outsiders. In fact, Lia was surprised he hadn’t ordered them to shoot the man in the back.
He must have suspected something was coming. Maybe that’s why he came home early. Maybe he saw the dead on their way.