The Revelations of Preston Black (Murder Ballads and Whiskey Book 3) (23 page)

“Like tormenting these young girls is
such difficult work that you should complain about the difficulty of the work?”
Danicka’s voice came from the midst of the group and from the forest at the
same time. Even Hicks seemed stunned at the defiant tone.

“You are not welcome here!” Hicks shouted.
“We’re through. I don’t owe you a thing.”

The group backed away from the woman
in grey. They should’ve run. They didn’t know what I knew. They didn’t know
they were about to be tested. Really tested. Hicks knew though. He was the only
one who looked scared.

“How dare you rush to judge this girl
without a demonstration of your own faith? You hide behind a microphone and
exhort your congregation to do
His
work while you
lead a life which requires no test of faith whatsoever. You make and break
rules as it pleases you, Reverend Elijah Clay Hicks. You act as if recitation
of scripture is enough to get a pass at all this.” Her voice boomed, as if
amplified. Her tone, angry.

Danicka moved to the space between
Hicks and the bikers, filling it with her presence. Her defense of me filled me
with an unforgivable sense of warmth. A calmness. I could see why Preston loved
her and found myself able to forgive him for that. Over and over I had to
remind myself what she was. As she came forward, a whoosh emerged from the
forest, like a soft breeze gently lifting leaves one by one. I could only hear
it between my own breaths.

Ashby and his companion yanked me up
by my arm and dragged me to the dirt mound. Up to the wooden crosses that
sprung from the rich red clay like some kind of sick billboard. The farthest
cross had quotes from Deuteronomy about stoning for worshipping other gods. The
center had verses from Leviticus and John about stoning for blasphemy and one
from Numbers about breaking the Sabbath.

My captor shoved me toward the cross
on the left. The one that read,
Any witch shall be stoned to
death, and only upon their hands shall their blood be. Leviticus 20:27.

I twisted and struggled, but they were
too strong.
Be
patient…

They spun me and pushed me against the
cross. My arms were pulled back sharply, sending waves of pain through my neck
and shoulders. They meant to bind my elbows together. From this vantage I could
see the grass at the edge of the field flutter, as if an invisible hand were
passing over it. The grass dipped and sprang back in waves.

Hicks saw it too, and used Boggs’s
absence as an excuse to leave. “Boggs! Come on out here and put an end to
this.”

A new scent came in on the breeze.
Cucumber
. Jamie always
talked about it, and Henry did too after last summer. Until now, I’d never
experienced anything like it.

“Hicks,” Danicka said. “Demonstrate
your faith to these people. Lead them by example.” She picked up a slender,
brown serpent and brushed its head against her cheek. She passed it off to a
woman standing near her, then bent down to pick up several more. “Behold, I
give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over your enemy.
Nothing shall hurt you.”

The first shout of fear came from a
woman at the very back of the crowd. A scream when the mass of water moccasins
and copperheads moved past her feet. I could see them swarming from the forest.
Scales and venom on the move.

“This is the word of your God. These
words are not mine. Your God demands this of you. Not me.” With several vipers
writhing in each hand, Danicka ranted, looking each parishioner dead in the eye
in turn as she spoke. “Do not judge this girl without first demonstrating your
own faith. You have forced this test upon yourselves.”

“Leave them!” Hicks yelled. “This woman
is testing you with her evil, evil ways. I know her, and know that her soul is
as black as the night. She is pure evil and you all need to stay away from
her.”

She passed the serpents in her right
hand off to the man standing closest to her. Others bent to pick up vipers, as
they’d done in services a hundred times. But these snakes weren’t well-fed, and
they didn’t come from refrigerated rooms where they were frequently handled.

“It is not my choice to see harm come
to you,” Danicka said. “But I would not ask you to follow my words without
action and I will let no harm come to this woman without an equal test of
faith. Hicks has given me no choice. Hicks has put you into this situation, not
God. Certainly not me.”

“Do not listen to her! Every word she
speaks is a lie,” Hicks screamed, his face reddened. He’d lost his swagger. He
sounded like he felt genuinely afraid. “I know her.”

But one of his people responded to
Danicka with an “Amen!”

Hicks went on. “This is real—not a
demonstration. You do not understand what this is. She is temptation! Sin!”

Danicka smiled. “Do as I do, not as I
say, Elijah Clay Hicks.”

“A false prophet, maybe even the devil
herself. She doesn’t know your names or how you got here. Listen to your
hearts, to what you know is right. If it is your will to show Miss Katy some
mercy, then so be it.” Hicks scrambled to make things right.

“This is faith.” Danicka teased a
copperhead with her thumb. She smiled when it sank its fangs into her. The
snake coiled itself tightly around her arm, like a bracelet. She let a second
snake, a cottonmouth, do the same thing on her right arm. She bent down to pick
up a third. “This is living without fear.”

Something exploded in the distance. A
loud boom that we all felt as much as heard. Through the trees I saw a tall
pillar of light.

Some of the people whooped. Some
shouted, “Amen!”

“Reverend!” Danicka yelled. “Don’t
leave this flock without a shepherd.”

I could smell death in the breath of
the newly awakened serpents. Thousands of them from all directions. The flock
huddled, pushing closer, with smaller children in the center.

“They shall take up serpents,” Danicka
said forcefully.

Hicks paused and turned, coming past
the gas well to issue an edict to his people. “Do not listen to her. She is
evil incarnate.”

A teenage girl screamed. She clutched
a wiry cottonmouth. It wriggled and twisted as the girl’s mother tried to pull
it off.

“Would she have cast the first stone?
I want to assure this girl,” she pointed at me, “that she only be judged by the
faithful and the righteous.”

“Stop it!” I yelled.

Another explosion shook us from the
north. Bright light followed by a wall of sound.

A man closed his eyes and slowly
dropped to his knees. I remembered him from last night. The guitar player.
Hicks had used his mic. The man picked up a serpent in each hand and lifted
them over his head as he’d done a thousand times before. The snakes spiraled
and twisted their golden bodies around his wrists, twisting to lash out at the
man’s skin with wet fangs. He cried, whether for the pain of the venom or the
pain of being forsaken, I’ll never know.

“Return with me… We’ll bring Katy and
minister to her as Jesus did.” Hicks stuttered, seemingly torn between his fear
of being revealed as a fake and genuine compassion for the people that had
followed him for so long. He backed toward the camp. Nobody followed.

As more cries of help and screams of
pain rained down from the victims, Hicks had to shout louder and louder to be
heard from across the field.

“Please, leave them be,” I protested,
but my voice didn’t carry very far.

Hicks spoke, but a shrieking hiss
emanating from the gas well drowned out his words. Hicks turned, but had no
time to react to the explosion that followed. White light and a thunderous
crack echoed off the trees that edged the forest. A rush of heat followed. I
turned my head and twisted away from my captors, who shielded their own faces
from the light and warmth.

The noise drew the remainder of the
congregation from their cabins. A hundred or so, in various states of dress,
watching the pillar of flame that rose hundreds of feet into the air. They had
no idea that Elijah Clay Hicks had been on the receiving end.

Danicka turned to me and tearfully
said, “And it came to pass, as he walked and talked, that a horse and chariot
of fire appeared, parting him asunder, and Elijah went up by a whirlwind to
heaven.”

I practically choked on the scent of
death that drifted through the air. By now the others had been shaken from the
shock of Hicks’s death and the appearance of the thousands of serpents that
surrounded their brothers and sisters. Led by Boggs himself, they broke toward
me. They looked mad.

“We’re done here,” Danicka said. “I’d
run.”

And the congregation swept past the
pillar of fire like it was invisible. They swarmed to the rock pile and took up
cobbles by the armful.

I turned and flung myself toward the
trees. I pumped my fists and kept telling myself that no matter how much it
hurt, I could always push myself to move faster. Rocks whooshed through the
leaves. Rocks bounced off tree trunks with thuds. Heavy rocks rolled past my
feet after hitting the ground short of me. Branches swatted my face with glossy
leaves, so I put my arms up to shield myself. Within seconds, I came upon the
electrified fence.

It looked exactly like the one on my
pap’s farm, except that it hung too low to crawl beneath. So I made a sharp
left and ran along the clearing between the barbed wire and the forest. The dry
air burned my throat and lungs. After a minute or two I heard a set of
footsteps echoing my own. I never once turned and looked. Instead I broke hard
left again to a greenbrier thicket. I stayed low to avoid the worst of the
jaggers, just like Bruh Rabbit. I based my strategy on the assumption that my
pursuers would be larger and wouldn’t fare as well in the thorns.

Somebody barked my name. “Katy!”

I heard it loud and clear but did not
stop. Bruh Rabbit knew better than to stop in the briar patch. My run had
turned into a scramble. I spent more than half of it on my hands and knees.

“Katy Bear!” I knew better than to be
deceived by familiarity.

Somebody crashed through the thicket
with me, totally disregarding the thorns. I stood and put my arms across my
face and broke into a full on sprint again. The jaggers caught my jacket and
jeans, tangling me in their wiry brambles but my legs never stopped pumping. I
rolled and twisted away from one thorny bush to another. When my hair got
caught I jerked away. When the skin on my hands and ankles got pinched I closed
my eyes and kept running. I welcomed the tiny stings of a hundred little cuts
as an alternative to whatever they had planned for me back up the hill. As each
jagger ripped away a little bit of skin I reminded myself that I still had my
skin, and as long as I breathed, I’d find a way out.

“Katy, please.” I heard something in
his voice, but knew better.

A hand brushed my back and I found the
speed I knew I could muster before they caught me again. At the end of the
briar patch I dashed forward, but my pursuer hadn’t been slowed one bit by my
tactics. About twenty yards ahead I saw where a tree had fallen across the
fence. I focused every ounce of life on that break. I envisioned myself on the
other side. As soon as I jumped through I scanned the ground for rocks. He
sounded close, and would catch me. But I’d find a rock, turn, and smash his
head open.

“Please…” The voice came from right
over my shoulder. Just like Freeze Tag in Pap’s fields.

I saw a power line right-of-way that
paralleled the fence and bolted for it. In the distance I saw a river, I didn’t
know which. Loose field stone had been piled up at the edges of the clearing.
Over and over I told myself to swing until I saw blood. Swing until I saw
blood.

My new rule number one.

Swing until I saw blood. Then keep
swinging until he stopped moving. I saw my stone and lunged for it.

It felt cold, and fit into my hand
like a baby doll head. When I rolled over he ran a step behind me. He fell to
his knees. I raised the rock over my head.

“Katy! Hey, hey… It’s okay.” He
grabbed my hand the moment I hesitated.

I looked at his face for a long time,
but couldn’t make sense of it.

“I saw the explosion.”

It wasn’t Preston or Pauly or anybody
else I ever expected to see out here.

“You okay?”

“Ben?”
More
deception?

“Preston was all over it and he called
me right after he called the police.” Ben overloaded me with information to
calm me. “Rachael and Jamie are on their way down. We got a way out of here.”

He stood, pulling me off the ground.
Then he took the rock from my hand. “Ain’t you cuter than a sack of puppies?”

“Ben?” A wave of relief washed over
me. I fought to control my emotions. I hugged my cousin, and rested my head
against his cheek. He squeezed me and held me for what felt like forever.

Just before I could ask him about
Preston a rumble grew from back at the camp.