Vivian Apple Needs a Miracle (29 page)

I fall into an uneasy half sleep, unable to relax my rigid limbs, unable to ignore the pain in my arms, my throat, my fingers. After a while I become aware of a figure in the chair by the wall, gazing down at me. I can't focus on him, but I know who he is. I recognize the way he sits—his ankle crossed over his knee. I want him to go. Not because I don't miss him—just because I don't want him to see me like this. I wish he could have seen me those few months I was strong. When I speak to him, my voice comes out a croak.

“Daddy.”

“You know what to do if your clothes catch fire, right, honey?” he asks, his voice an echo in my head. “You stop, drop, and roll.”

“I know. That's what I'll do.”

“Good. And careful not to touch the doorknob, okay? If there's a fire in the hall, it'll burn the skin right off of your hand.”

I try to push myself up to see him better, but my hands sink through the floor. I have a feeling he's smiling at me; he's waiting for me to figure it out; he'll be so proud of me once I manage to sit up straight. I feel a sharp pang then. I've just remembered a terrible secret about him, a secret I know I have to tell him but don't want to.

“Dad.” I will my eyes to focus on him. “You shouldn't be here. You're dead.”

And at that moment I can really see him for the first time: the freckles on his cheeks and his messy brows, the tiny scar on his upper lip I don't know the cause of and never will. I watch the grin slip off his face, and I watch him frown, confused and sorry.

“Oh, that's right,” he says, and disappears.

Then I dream that the lock is turning. Someone is at the door to my room, and somehow they have a key. I try to get to my feet; I say, “I'm here!” but I'm dizzy with sleep and pain and hunger. The room swirls around me, and I have to lower myself on the bed, heart racing.

The door pushes open. Derrick, Wilkins's Peacemaker partner from the Chateau Marmont, sticks his head in. When he sees me, he starts to laugh.

Not a dream, then—a nightmare. I think to pinch myself, but when I glance down, I see my scratched and bloody hands and know it's really happening. I struggle to stand as Derrick steps inside.

“What are you doing here?”

“This city is on
fire,
little girl.” He's menacing and huge under the flickering fluorescent. I notice his glazed eyes and a sharp, whiskey smell. He's drunk. “Didn't you know? Judgment Day has arrived, and thanks to you, every last one of us feels the flames of hell lick our backs. Even me. You couldn't just let it be true. You
had
to defile the Prophet Taggart's son. You
had
to step in and spread your disgusting story.”

I don't understand, but I feel a surge of anger, stronger than fear, stronger than hunger, a simple annoyance that he tracked me down just to pin all the Church's atrocities on me. If I ever had patience for Believers who wanted to convince me of my own wickedness, I've officially run out of it.

“It's so odd,” I say, “that God didn't want you around up there in His kingdom. What a
catch
you are. He must really be kicking Himself right now.”

Everything goes white. Derrick has smacked me, and before I can shake the spots from my eyes, he hits me across the other cheek. I feel the sting of the cut on my jaw breaking open. He's going to hurt me worse than I've ever been hurt before. Derrick takes me by the throat, pushes me against the concrete wall. I scream, kicking fiercely, trying to land my foot hard in his groin. But his grip only gets tighter; with his other arm, he digs an elbow in my gut. I feel my breath leaving me, my legs going weak, a dark shadow at the edge of my sight. I'm going to pass out, I realize. I have a kind of vision then. I see the three of us—Harp, Peter, and me—in Point Reyes, at the moment we found the trail to Frick's compound. We came together to link our arms around one another's shoulders, tired and triumphant. We made a triangle. I hold on to it, this image, this last thread of consciousness. I would die like this a thousand times, as long as I still got to live in that moment.

But then there's a sickening crack, and Derrick stumbles forward, his weight pressing me against the wall. He's heavy, but my body seizes in relief; I gasp for breath, my eyes streaming. Someone pulls Derrick off me, and when I'm able to focus, I'm sure for a moment that I
am
dead. Because there's no logical explanation for what I see: the woman who stands before me, the butt of the rifle she holds still poised in the air, reared back from when she slammed it against Derrick's skull, her red-blond hair long and swinging down her back, eyes burning with a fury like I've never seen, until she glances at my face.

My mother.

“Mom?”

My body trembles in pain and shock and I realize when I say it that I'm sobbing. My mother leans forward and puts a soft hand on my forehead. It's a gesture I recognize from any number of childhood sick days—for some reason she's checking me for fever. Her eyes well up.

“He was going to
kill
you!” she exclaims, like she can't believe it. She glances down at Derrick's body, motionless on the floor, and I see for the first time that Winnie and Kimberly are with her, both of them unbelievably intimidating with their rifles strapped across their backs and belts of ammo. Winnie checks Derrick's pulse, and my mother raises a hand to her mouth. “Oh my God, Winnie, is he . . . ? Tell me I didn't . . . ?”

“He's alive, Mara.” Winnie looks up and catches my eye; her worried face breaks into a grin. “If anything, I'd say you went a little too easy on him.”

Mom sighs. She turns back and wraps her arms around me, holding me too tight against her. My body aches, and I can't stop crying. It's a release like I've never known, more powerful even than the moment I discovered her alive in Winnie's apartment. Because this time, she came to me. She looked for me, she found me, and she saved me.

“What are you doing here?” I manage to croak.

Mom doesn't get the chance to answer before I hear new footsteps and peer over her shoulder. Harp stands in the doorway, backpack on her shoulders, clucking her tongue.

“Vivian Harriet Motherfucking Apple,” she says, taking in the scene around her with a skeptical eye. “You never call, you never write—you're always bleeding from the face in the basements of observatories with weird men lying unconscious on your floor. Seriously, dude—you've changed.”

I tear myself away from my mother and throw my arms around Harp's neck. “I thought I was going to die here,” I murmur into her shoulder. “I thought I was going to die.”

Harp hugs me back tightly. “Trust me, we'd have gotten here a lot sooner if we'd had any idea where you were. Especially if we'd known you were locked in a room, looking like you'd just crawled your way out of a fucking grave or something. Jesus, Viv.” She holds me at arm's length to get a better look. “They really did a number on you.”

“I'm fine. Really!” I insist, looking at all of their dubious expressions. The open door, Harp, my warrior big sister, even the wonderful, confusing presence of my mother—they've made my face stop throbbing, the ache of hunger fade. “How did you know where to find me?”

Harp gives me an exaggerated eye roll—a telltale sign of a great story to come—but Winnie steps forward, lays a hand on my shoulder. “We'll tell you on the way.”

“Oh shit—that's right.” Harp gently slaps her forehead and looks at me. “We have to hustle if we want to save your boyfriend from certain doom.”

“Why?” My knees buckle under me, and Harp and my mother have to take me by the elbows to hold me up straight. “Where's Peter? What have they done to him?”

“We'll explain,” says Winnie. She leads us into the hallway and heads for the exit at a jog with Kimberly, Harp, and me right behind. Mom hesitates, maybe to check on Derrick, who I can hear moaning quietly now, but after a moment she catches up.

Everything hurts. My legs are achy with disuse and my lungs sear with pain. The dark observatory seems to have been abandoned all at once, in a panic—doors thrown open, papers scattered across the floor, guns and batons and pocket-size Books of Frick left behind, dropped wherever their owners stood. If I didn't know better, I'd believe the second Rapture had happened the way Frick said it would: one moment the Believers were here, the next they were gone. But outside, we spill onto the steps leading down to the lawn and into the light of the setting sun, and I see the tread of car tires across the grass, scorched from the speed at which they flew—the Church left Griffith Observatory in a hurry, but they left of their own accord.

Winnie leads us to a car. I've only just gotten in—Harp and my mother flanking me in the back seat—when Winnie turns the ignition and peels down the long curving road. My mother has to scramble to shut her door, which still hangs open as we move.

“Okay, so,” Harp begins eagerly, “we had no idea where you were. We figured the Church had taken you—to be honest, we kind of hoped. The worst case was you'd been attacked in the street, that you were . . .” She trails off. I know what she's thinking: Robbie. “I was scared. Winnie wasn't exactly keeping it cool herself.”

“Understatement of the motherfucking century,” Kimberly interjects.

My mother roots around in the bag strapped across her shoulders and starts to pull out random food items: a spotted banana, a granola bar, a plastic bag full of nuts. My stomach growls and I give her a grateful look, gorging on them as the others continue the story.

“I should have known you would go to see Peter that night.” Winnie drives way above the speed limit, but her voice is as steady as her hands on the wheel. “I should have made you take me with you.”

“And I'd always assumed that if you were going to die, I'd be there. That we'd do it together, in a cinematic blaze of glory.” Harp's voice is light, but I know how serious she is. “So we were quite the barrel of laughs for a while there. Right after you disappeared, Peter shows up on TV and gives this rousing speech saying they've caught you. I figured he'd sold you out. I almost told Amanda to go ahead and blow up the Chateau then and there—but of course, for all we knew, you were inside. They talked about you on the news every day. They kept calling you a witch. They said you were being kept in a secret location, that they were interrogating you to find out Satan's plans for America on the day of the apocalypse. They said at one point you opened your mouth and a python crawled out of it, spitting venom at your interrogators—” Harp breaks here, unable to keep from laughing; when she sees the grim look on my face, she laughs even harder, doubling over, literally slapping one knee. “Oh God, I'm sorry; it was just so good. I can't even—Oh God. Anyway. We were so desperate I went on the blog and told them the whole thing was a lie, that I'd made it up—”

“Masterson showed me.”

“He did?” Harp can't keep a little note of pride out of her voice.

“He called it an obvious bluff.”

She scoffs at this. “Well, of course it was. But we had to give it a shot. We hoped they'd show mercy—maybe release you, or at the very least go easy on you. Anyway,
clearly
it didn't work. And Amanda was not exactly thrilled we'd done it without her go-ahead—”

Kimberly laughs. “I take it back.
That's
the understatement of the century.”

Winnie takes over. “Amanda had wanted to go ahead with the demonstration, to make Joanna public. But we'd asked her to wait—we worried if we went public with the missing Raptured while the Church still had you in custody, they'd kill you in retaliation. That wasn't exactly a deterrent for Amanda, of course. But Diego took my side, and so did the rest of the militia—and obviously, Umaymah wasn't about to let you die. She left with Joanna and the rest of the Believers and she only told Harp where they were going.”

Harp grins. “They were still in LA, but Amanda didn't know where. Plus I gave Edie the video of Joanna's story on a flash drive, and destroyed the copy on my laptop. Amanda couldn't get her hands on it, and she couldn't move forward without the Raptured Believers.”

“They'd stepped up Peacemaker presence at the Chateau by a lot,” Winnie continues, “so we couldn't search it without mounting a full-scale attack. We decided to wait for the second boat before we looked for you—we figured they'd clear out of the Chateau and the city, and we could launch a proper rescue mission. We counted on you being alive, and them leaving you behind. And then, two days ago, pretty much all hell broke loose.”

“Dylan showed up,” Harp interjects. “The night before the Rapture. He was jumpy as fuck, but he told us they were keeping you in the observatory.”

“Harp and I are ready to jump in the car and go at that point,” Winnie continues, “but then a special Church broadcast comes on—they're playing it on all the networks.”

“Blackmore speaks, leads a Hail Frick, encourages everyone to stay calm no matter what happens. But then Peter gets up and . . . oh, Viv.” Moved, Harp presses a hand to her chest at the memory. “He was incredible. He starts with his notes—and he's all hell and damnation this and secular morals that—then he looks up, right into the camera, and says: ‘They're lying to you. They lied about the first Rapture and they're lying about this one. They're going to kill you if they take you, so don't let them take you.' Then the feed cuts out. The newscasters come back all confused, telling us that Taggart's son has been possessed by Satan, Frick have mercy on his soul—”

“Which was exactly the wrong thing to say,” Winnie notes. “Because even if you still believe, the demonic possession of the face of the Church of America on the eve of the second Rapture is not exactly going to inspire confidence. Everyone panicked. Harp gets in touch with Umaymah; they post the story about Joanna then and there, while we figure the Church would be preoccupied, and the response was—”