Children of the Earth (26 page)

32

TH
E SCENT OF ROSES FIL
LED
Daphne’s car as she pulled slowly away from the Peytons’ trailer, the puttering gurgle of her motor the only sound in the silent winter morning. They sat on her empty passenger seat, a bouquet of white blooms that matched the snow carpeting the ground where the oil rig had once been.

It was gone now, the machinery trucked away to a fresh well in North Dakota, Dale and his crew with it. Uncle Floyd had been adamant that the rig, and all the greed it stood for, be torn down. But that wasn’t why they’d left.

According to the roughnecks on Dale’s crew, the reserves had run dry the day the God of the Earth set foot on land. The machinery pumped nothing but dust, clogging the pipes and rusting the valves, and not one of the experts from Global Oil HQ could explain why. A month after that day, in the dreary November afternoon, all that was left of the once-bustling rig was a series of raised berms in Daphne’s rearview mirror, scar tissue over wounds that had once gushed the earth’s blood.

Her car glided smoothly over the road, her motor starting to purr as it warmed to the day. There were no more potholes, no more water trucks and construction vehicles and prospectors’ RVs to cause them. Aside from her Subaru making its way to and from Elmer’s Gas ’n’ Grocery, where she did the bulk of the Peytons’ shopping, there was almost no traffic at all.

Her heartbeat picked up, as it always did, when she rounded the bend in front of the police station. But despite the power of her memories there was no crowd of people under the flagpole, no body strung up there like a scarecrow with a glistening teardrop of blood on his forehead. Only the stars and stripes greeted her with a half-mast salute, bolstered by a light breeze.

Detectives Madsen and Fraczek had discarded her file after dozens of eyewitnesses testified to seeing the Children of the Earth perform the same grizzly death ritual on Eunice that had claimed the sheriff and Janie. And with the prospectors gone there was no need for a police presence in Carbon County beyond the state troopers’ occasional passes through.

Still, she could almost feel the memory of the detectives’ accusatory stares through the dusty venetian blinds, and as she cruised past the squat green building she flicked the heating dial on her dashboard so it blasted a welcome shot of warm air into her face.

She idled at the stop sign marking a fork in the road. The left prong snaked up into the mountains, to the low, empty building where the Vein had once stood. Its sign still glowed red at night, but cracks had formed in the cheap asphalt of its parking lot, and the padlock on its doors had begun to rust. The Children of the Earth had fled town as soon as their god abandoned them, pillaging the Vein’s kitchen of every pot, pan, and sack of rice, even prying the industrial oven and dishwasher from the walls. Rumors flitted through the Carbon County gossip mill that they had gone west, picking up stragglers along the way with the promise of starting a new commune in Washington state, near where the old one had been. Someone had even claimed to have seen little Charlie’s somber brown eyes peeking out from the window of their van, but that supposed eye-witness was often drunk and not to be trusted.

Maybe the rumors were true, or maybe they were idle speculation. Daphne tried not to listen to the gossip. It had no place in her new life, a life spent caring for her shell-shocked aunt and uncle, volunteering with the wounded at the hospital, taking correspondence courses through the community college in Rawlins, and trying not to get lost in yawning afternoon silences and restless dreams.

She turned right, onto the road leading to town. LED letters still trawled the window in Elmer’s Gas ’n’ Grocery, advertising
Hot Dogs 2 for
$2.99
and
Firewood S
pecial: $4/Bundle
, but in the once-packed parking lot there was just Elmer’s tired Jeep, brooding under the steel-colored sky.

Across the street, the Sleep-EZ Motel was dark and deserted. Only a sign at the entrance to an empty dirt lot indicated that there had once been a bustling trailer park next door. The shops and restaurants along Main Street were shuttered yet again, the way Daphne had found them when she first arrived. Their signs, painted and hung just months before, were bright as carnival clowns against the town’s gray facade. An old newspaper, its headline proclaiming
No More Oil?!
, cartwheeled down the empty street on a stiff breeze.

Carbon County was vacant again, quiet. It was exactly what Daphne had wanted when she’d escaped Detroit: wide-open spaces and fresh mountain air, nights where there was nothing to do but watch for shooting stars. But she had been consumed then, buzzing with a rage so great she could barely contain it, angry at the world for creating her stepfather and then blaming her for his death, wracked with guilt over the darkness in her past.

Now the darkness was gone. Like Carbon County, she was wide-open inside, white and quiet as the fields blanketed in snow. There had been no more seizures since she’d sacrificed Owen to defeat the God of the Earth, no more lapsing into another world where God filled her head with the thunder of his visions. She was no longer a prophet, but she was no longer a killer either, or a victim. She was simply Daphne, and that was enough.

She still had a role in Carbon County, but it was a simpler one. She brought soup to the dozens of parishioners still recovering from burned flesh and broken bones in the hospital, victims of the Battle of the Great Divide. She volunteered on the restoration crew to clear shrapnel and ammunition from the mega-church’s explosion, some of which had flown as far as the Savage Mountains. She cooked for Aunt Karen and Uncle Floyd, made sure they were tucked in warm under afghans in front of the TV and had something uplifting to watch, a nature documentary or a show about how things were made, anything to help them through their grief. And of course there were her online classes.

That day, though, she passed the hospital, passed the turnoff to the Savage Mountains, and kept driving.

She pulled into the cemetery and cut the engine, the valley morning engulfing her in quiet. A hawk circled overhead, its wings nothing but a dark blink against the drifting clouds, but she was too far away to hear its cries.

She gathered the roses in her arms, their scent wrapping her in the faraway promise of springtime. She felt like it would never be spring again, and that was fine. The winter suited her; it suited the whole town. They needed time for things to be cold and dead, time before they could blossom once again. There was too much to process, and too much grieving to do, before the earth began to thaw.

The rows of new gravestones were cold, shiny slabs rising from the ground, granite polished until it reflected the weak sunlight. Most bore nothing but a name and a date of death. The congregation had grown so quickly and been so new; Pastor Ted’s TV show drew them from all over the country to experience the End Times, but instead of a true Rapture it was their own End of Days that had befallen them, their untimely deaths in a flame-locked church or beneath the fiery footsteps of an angry God. Still, whether she knew them or not, Daphne put a single rose on each of their graves.

She paused when she got to old Eunice’s headstone. It was white marble, as her will had requested, and covered from top to bottom in text: the names of her late husband and parents, son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren, quotes and proverbs that she had loved enough to keep in needlepoint on pillows all around her house.

Daphne lingered there, reading and rereading the words, thorns from the roses digging into her palms. She wanted to delay what came next: a trio of headstones that always hurt to look at but that would be even more unbearable to ignore.

They had all been so young. Doug Varley. Janie. Jeremiah, the baby who never took a breath. She placed the rest of the flowers on their graves and knelt in prayer, the snow soaking her knees and her tears watering the cold, hard ground.

She hoped that they were together again, wherever they were. She hoped that somewhere out there they could finally be the happy family they had never been in life. She no longer knew what she believed, had no idea if there was a heaven or an afterlife or anything at all. All she knew was that they deserved to be together; they deserved more in death than they’d gotten to experience in their short lives.

She stood slowly, her lips chapped from wind and tears. She smoothed a loose strand of hair into her wool cap and willed herself to leave the cemetery, to hurry to the hospital, where the sick and injured were waiting for her cool touch and gentle words.

But there was one more goodbye she wanted to say, a few last tears she wanted to cry.

There was no headstone for Owen in the cemetery, no acknowledgment of the sacrifice he had made, no cold slab of granite proclaiming his name. No place to rest her last rose.

Still, she could feel his presence. She could feel him in the dirt and the rain, when a hard downpour felt feathery light on her shoulders. She could feel it when she slipped on an icy patch in the Peytons’ driveway and the ground caught her like a cushion, protecting her fall. She could feel it in the way the trees sang sometimes in the wind, and in the bite of a million cold stars when she tilted her face to the sky late at night, when she couldn’t sleep and came outside seeking something she couldn’t name.

He was out there somewhere, and she knew in the wide-open whisper of the future and the faint scent of motor oil that followed her everywhere that he wasn’t gone for good. Someday, she knew, she would see him again. Someday she would kiss his lips and trace the calluses on his hands, and when that day came she would pull him to her and never let him go.

She didn’t know how or when, but she knew it as sure as she knew the ground would thaw in the spring and the cold gray peaks around Carbon County would eventually mellow to green. Things weren’t over for her and Owen. Someday, somehow, they would be together again.

Acknowledgments

A lot of awesome people helped bring this book to life. To my wonderful editor, Jessica Almon:
Children of the Earth
is as much your baby as it is mine, and I couldn’t have asked for a better partner in rearing this little monster of ours.

Tina Wexler, I love bragging about my agent to anyone who will listen. Thanks for talking me off the wrong ledges and encouraging me to leap from the right ones, and for your sage (and notably un-slimy) advice about blurbs.

Casey McIntyre, the day you became my publicist is a national holiday in the Schumacher household. Thanks for everything from masterminding an unforgettable launch party to booking me on a packed panel at NY ComicCon.

Emily Osborne, you are a genius. The first time I saw your moody, mystical cover, it was like a punch in the gut . . . in a good way!

Ivan Anderson, your knowledge and attention to detail come through in every proofread: thanks to you, I will never inadvertently misuse the word “decimate” again. I’m also eternally grateful to Kate Frentzel and Jenna Pocius for your tireless edits and keen eyes.

Ben Schrank, you’ve been a guiding force every step of the way. I couldn’t have asked for a better team than your crew at Razorbill;
working with you is always a dream.

I owe both enormous gratitude and a rather large apology to Joyce and River Higgenbottom, whose fascinating and down-to-earth
Paganism: An Introduction to Earth-Centered Religions
informed the structure (if absolutely not the sentiment) of the Children of the Earth’s rituals.

Joan Burick and Annie Keating Schumacher, your support means everything to me (and, quite possibly, to my book sales). To my mom and dad, Zeke and Linda Hecker, I never would have written a word without you, and I hope you never forget that.

Tim Schumacher, I just can’t even with how awesome you are. I literally can’t.

Finally, I’m humbled and honored to be part of an amazing community of people who not only purchased my first book (often in multiples) but also recommended it to others, traveled from far and wide to attend the
End Times
book launch, and advocated for it as a selection in their book clubs. We are all lucky to have each other, and I’m especially lucky to have you.

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