Posted on August 13, 2007

Part 28

Later, when she hadn’t come to get him, he went to her. Evajean was sitting on the couch in the house’s living room, reading a fat, clothbound blue book. “It’s the Bible,” she said when he glanced at it. “All they have is this stuff.” She pointed at a little shelf against a wall, where half a dozen books were propped up by a coffee can.

“I want to know what happened,” he said, sitting down next to her. The dog padded in from the bedroom, yawned, and lay down on the rug.

“You should take him outside,” she said.

“I will.”

“You should do it now, he might have to go.”

“Tell me what happened,” he said. “Run me through it and then I’ll take the dog out to piss.”

She looked at him sharply. “You’re still being this way?”

“What way?”

“You’re still going to act like this?”

“I’m not acting like anything,” he said, and lifted the book out of her hands. “You’re really reading this?”

“What else is there?” she said.

He shrugged. “So was I out when you woke up? Or did you never pass out?”

“You mean the accident?”

He nodded.

She leaned back into the cushions and gazed up at the ceiling. “I didn’t hit my head. What I remember–and you have to understand, this was all happening so quickly–but what I remember is that boy in the road and you swerved. Then there was a big bump, which I guess was us going over the curb–”

“Or the boy.”

“–and then it was all just chaos. I really thought I was going to die, Elliot.”

“You probably almost did,” he said. He wanted her to appreciate the weight of what they’d been through, to recognize it as serious, because that would make convincing her to maintain that reference easier. They weren’t out of trouble yet.

Evajean swallowed. “And then it was like I was in this tunnel, being spun around and banged into things. You were screaming and the dog was barking, and I just pressed my hands into the dashboard because I guess I thought I might fly out. And then it stopped. The truck stopped falling and I could tell we were upside down. I didn’t know where, you know? But your eyes were closed and your mouth was open and I knew you’d been knocked out. I didn’t know if you were even alive, Elliot.”

“Sure,” he said. “I was lucky to be. You too.”

“And so I got out of the car and I could see how bad it was and I just started yelling for help, panicking, I guess. And then, this is the really weird part, I just got this feeling like I knew which direction help was. I knew where I needed to go to be safe and get you safe. So I took the dog because I didn’t want it to get eaten by a bear or a mountain lion or something and I started walking.”

“And you ended up here.”

“No,” she said, “no, I actually didn’t think I’d picked right after a while, because I’d walked for, I don’t know, a couple of hours and hadn’t found anything. I kept shouting for someone but nobody heard me.”

“Then how–”

“They found me. I’d pretty much given up at that point and was ready to just go to sleep and see what happened in the morning. And then I heard some people talking and laughing and then these guys just came out of the woods. Funny thing was, they were dressed up all strange in these big robes and carrying weird stuff like a table, but I knew they weren’t any danger. I told them what happened and they sent me back here with one of them. I guess he got them to go out and look for you.”

“Were they grey robes? With blue?”

“Yeah,” she said. “You saw them?”

“I think so. Right before I was attacked the second time.”

She looked at him, confused. “Second–”

“The crazies attacked me once, tried to grab me, but I managed to get away. That’s when I came across the men you just described and while I was watching them, the crazies came back and took me to where I was when the men showed up to rescue me. Did the guys in the robes tell you what they were doing?”

“No,” she said, “and I didn’t ask.”

“I don’t like it,” he said.

“Right, you already said that. But what don’t you like, Elliot? They’re nice and friendly and–”

“But don’t you feel it? Like there’s something we’re not seeing, something under how nice and friendly they are? I keep getting images in my head, Evajean, like there’s a sickness here I haven’t found yet.”

“That’s crazy.”

“What’s crazy? Those people in the street we saw? The boy we ran into? Those crazy fucks who kidnapped me, took me to that cave? The whole world’s crazy now and it’s been crazy for, goddamn, for a long time.” He turned to face her directly, grabbing her shoulders. “You know what those guys you found were doing in the woods? With their table? Some kind of ritual, is what. I saw them, setting a chest on that table and putting a rock in a hat. One of them stuck his face in that hat and then he lead them all to goddamn buried treasure. What do you think these people do here, with their church and their shelves of Bibles? It’s a cult, Evajean. That’s why they’re so happy. Everyone in cults is always so happy.”

“Elliot–”

“Until they kill themselves or put poison gas in the subways. Shit, the one I talked to after they rescued me, he called what they did to the crazies in the cave–and you should’ve seen what they did except you don’t really want to, trust me–he said it was ‘blood atonement.’ How friendly and helpful is that?”