When I was nine years old, the Christian world celebrated the tenth anniversary of Dad’s time inside the mountain - without the Paulson family. We gathered in Nebraska and celebrated privately - without Dad. He mostly spent the time alone, running in the woods or on the obstacle course at Aunt Cindi’s property. Mom and I were sitting together on the big back porch, sipping iced tea, but I could see that Dad was now on the stun gun range, shooting tiny drones.
“Mom? What happened to Daddy inside the mountain?” I asked.
“You know the answer. Some bad people hurt him.”
“Is that why Daddy doesn’t want to think about it?”
“I suppose it is.”
I was quiet for a minute while I thought.
“Why does everyone else celebrate Daddy getting hurt?”
It was a bad question to ask just as Mom was swallowing some iced tea and she had to spit a little back into her glass to keep from choking.
“I guess it’s because Daddy didn’t allow being hurt to change who he is or what he believes,” she said. “He was faithful, even when it was possible that he would die for those beliefs.”
“Uncle Cameron told me that you and the rest of the family fought off the bad people and saved him,” I replied.
“We were all there at the end…” Mom said “… but we didn’t save him. God did that.”
Later that day, I watched as Dad set off for another run in the woods. I waited a few minutes and set off after him. I knew he’d hear me following. He wouldn’t even need to look over his shoulder to know that it was me. He left the trail almost immediately, signaling that he knew I was behind him, and the chase was on. It was only a matter of time before he’d try to jump out from behind a rock or a tree and scare me. It had been a while since he’d been successful, so I knew he’d be determined.
He broke into a sprint which I couldn’t possibly match, but it made him easier to track. When the tracks showed me that his pace had slowed, I knew he must be hiding nearby, so I decided to throw him off by doing something random. I stopped looking for tracks, and sprinted away in a wide arc, hoping to catch a glimpse of him from an angle he couldn’t anticipate. I searched for the next half hour, without any luck, and then returned to the spot where I first lost him and sat against a large fir tree to think.
A soft fir cone hit me on the leg. A second one would have hit me on the head, had I not rolled out of the way.
“Was that some sort of lesson? To look up to find my father?” I asked Dad, who was sitting on a branch fifteen meters above me.
“Well, maybe to find your earthly father, but I certainly hope you wouldn’t limit yourself to looking to the sky for your Heavenly Father,” he replied.
I climbed the tree and sat beside him.
“Slice of apple?” Dad asked and produced a bag from his pocket.
I took a slice and waited while Dad gave thanks, beginning as usual with “My Dear Friend.” We had a good view of the forest from our perch, and Dad smiled as he looked out.
“Dad? I’ve never heard anyone else in the family begin a prayer with ‘My Dear Friend.’ Where did you learn to begin a prayer that way?”
“Jerusalem … in the Temple.”
“Did you learn it from Jesus?”
“You could say that. I got to look Jesus in the eyes several times, but I only spoke to Him once. When He healed my vocal cords, He told me to return to my people and use my gifts, and I said ‘I’ll use my gifts for you, Lord.’ The sadness in His eyes was unmistakable.”
“Sadness?” I asked. “Why would that make Jesus sad?”
“Because of the formality; because I didn’t treat Him like my dear friend.”
“But Jesus is God,” I replied. “We have to treat Him with reverence.”
Dad smiled.
“Yes,” Dad said. “I revere Him like a trusted friend, but I’m careful not to let revering Him get in the way of loving Him. Constantly using all of the ‘Thees’ and ‘Thous’ can sometimes make us overlook the humanity of Jesus, which was the whole point of Him becoming flesh in the first place.”
It was a lot to take in, so I didn’t respond.
“Let me put it another way, Jocie,” Dad said. “I believe that kind of false reverence is like stitching the veil back together, after God went to such pains to rip it in two in the first place.”
******
We all stare at the message scratched into the dried blood.
“We should leave,” Zera says.
“Wait,” Austin says. “I need to do something.”
He stands between the posts; then reaches out to the two cuffs that they used to restrain Dad as they whipped him. Austin’s arms aren’t long enough to reach both cuffs at the same time, so he shifts to the left to grab just one.
“Don’t touch it,” Zera says. “It just feels wrong.”
“Sometimes it seems like I’ve never really understood Dad,” Austin replies. “I just thought…”
He grabs the cuff on the left and lets his hand close around it, but gasps as he does it. His hand comes away quickly, and he looks at his palm before clenching his fist.
“We need to go … NOW,” he whispers.
We’re only halfway to the main entrance when we hear voices. Zera motions for us to follow her. We move to the shadows at the back of the stage and are standing silently when three men enter the room. Each has black lines on his neck and face.
Are they Corps? Or Temple Guard?
“I told you they’d come here someday,” one of them says. “It looks like my motion sensors weren’t a waste of time after all.”
“You can gloat later. They turned on a light over the stage, so let’s see what they’ve been doing.”
The three walk to the posts.
“God’s Judgment,” the tallest one reads and snorts. “It looks like ‘Five-X’ has been here alright. We’d better report it.”
“They’ll lock us in,” Austin whispers.
Zera takes my hand and I take Austin’s, as she slowly leads us farther into the dark at the back of the stage. My foot knocks something over with a clatter.
“Don’t move,” one of the men yells, as flashlights come on and light us up.
They’ve all drawn stun guns.
“It’s just some kids,” he says, and relaxes a bit.
“We’re sorry,” Zera says. “Sometimes we go into the old tunnel to mess around. The big door has always been closed before, but this time it was open. We came in to look for a bedroom, but we got lost.”
She’s good at lying.
“I don’t care how you got in here. Get your hands up!”
Zera releases my hand and puts both of her hands up into the air, so Austin and I follow suit. “Since we were up here to mess around …” Zera says, “… maybe we could make a deal … to help you forget that we were here.”
She takes a step forward, swinging her hips from side to side. The men are clearly interested in the deal. Zera removes her jacket, revealing to me a stun gun holstered in the small of her back.
If I play along, maybe I can get to the gun - but I’ve never shot one before.
I try to take a step forward the way Zera did, and find it unnatural to play the part of a seductress. It seems as if the men will laugh at how awkward I look, but they don’t. I drop my arm to Zera’s shoulder and she does the same.
“We’re a great team,” Zera says. “But three is an odd number and my friend here has a lot of firepower.”
She drops her hand down to my hip, and I do the same. “Do you have some more guys outside who’d like to join?”
I look at the black lines on their faces. The thought of any of these men touching me is revolting.
“Just one,” the tallest man says.
“That’s all I wanted to know,” Zera replies.
She turns her body so that my hand slides from her hip and onto the grip of the pistol. I’ve never held a pistol before, but it feels like a natural extension of my arm. As Zera rolls to the ground in front of me, I click the safety off and shoot first the tallest man, then the man to his left. The third man is so surprised that he shoots the floor, and then tries to run, but Zera has already regained her feet and kicks him in the back. He shoots the floor again on his way down, then loses his grip on his gun as he’s sent sprawling.
He crawls to recover his gun, but Zera easily beats him to it and kicks it across the floor to Austin, who picks it up. The man sits up and stares at each of us.
“I didn’t know The Corps was carrying unregistered stun guns now,” Austin says, as he examines it.
“All the better to leave no trace that they’ve been there…” Zera says, “…but these guys aren’t Corps. They’re Temple Guard.”
“And you three aren’t from Five-X,” the man says. “You’re all marked, and to Five-X, this is holy ground. They’d never scratch graffiti in his blood.”
So Five-X must be where ex-members of Four went when they were disbanded.
“So I take it you kids are marked Christians?” he continues. “Pray until you’re blue in the face. It won’t change that your parents took the vaccine, and it won’t remove those bruises and wounds.”
“You seem to know a lot about Five-X,” I say. “How do you find them?”
“For you three, finding them would be a waste of time. Five-X doesn’t care how devout you are. They only accept The Washed. For that matter, they only accept people who are smart, and you three don’t qualify for that either.”
Zera and Austin jump back with surprise when I shoot him with the stun gun.
“Why’d you do that?” Austin asks.
“He was stalling us. Run!”
Zera leads us to a door at the back of the stage, then through a maze of half-lit corridors until we emerge from the building and onto the “street.” She pulls us into a small building, just in time to avoid a patrol of four heavily-armed men. Three more groups pass, spreading in different directions as they form a search pattern.
“The blast doors where we came in are just around the next corner,” Zera says. “If there’s less than a dozen, maybe we can shoot our way out.”
“The doors where we came in? Are you saying there’s another way out?”
“There’s a second set of blast doors at the south end of the complex,” she replies.
I look at Austin.
“Mom always has a backup plan,” he says.
Another group of four armed men passes our hiding place, and we fall in line behind them, working our way deeper into the complex. We somehow manage to stay between groups, until Zera motions for us to turn to the left while the men go straight.
I take Austin’s hand and talk to him using our finger code.
Something isn’t right, I say. How does she know the layout of the complex?
Beats me… he replies. …but I don’t see much choice except to follow her.
He’s right; so I release his hand.
The street we’re on dead-ends onto a larger street that runs along the cavern wall. Zera motions for us to stop as she peeks around the corner of the last building.
“There’s nobody in sight,” she says. “We cross this road and take the one just to the right. If there’s anyone guarding the doors, they might get the first shot as we round the corner. When I give the signal, go hard and fast.”
Austin and I again have little choice but to follow her lead.
We cross the road quickly, and then flatten ourselves against the cavern wall. Zera raises her hand to tell us that she’s about to go, when we hear a shout from two hundred meters behind us. When I look, men are firing at us. I can feel a slight tingle as the shots pass and even hit us, but the stun waves are too dispersed at this distance to have any real effect.
Zera forgets the hand signals and says “Go!”
I go first, and find that there are two young men standing in front of the door. They don’t have the black lines on their faces, like the older men, but do have unusually large numbers of bruises and wounds compared to most of The Marked. I shoot them both before they can raise their weapons.
Good. Maybe getting stunned will cause more wounds to open up on them.
I realize that Austin and Zera aren’t behind me. They’re standing at the tunnel entrance and preparing to return fire, buying me time to get the door open.
The area is well lit and there’s no sign of where Mom may have cut into the old systems. My eyes follow the various conduits, until I see a small box embedded into the wall like an electrical panel. I open it and relax when I see a small computer pad.
The men must have closed the distance, because Austin and Zera begin firing.
I activate the pad and use the same password as before to gain access. This time, I can control a lot more than just the door. I can control virtually every system. I open the blast door behind me, then close and lock the one we used earlier, to ensure we can’t get cut off. Then I turn out all the lights, before disconnecting the pad.
I turn on my flashlight and yell “Let’s go!” to Zera and Austin, but they’re already on their way. When we get through the blast door, we push it shut behind us.
“They’ll just push it open,” Zera says. “We need to wedge it shut somehow.”
There’s another control panel on this side of the door; so I open it and smile when I find more of Mom’s handiwork. I plug the pad back in and lock the door.
I could do more than lock the door. I could shut down the ventilation and turn on the generators to use up all the air. I could make sure they never hurt another Christian. The world would be better off without them.
“Jocie? What are you doing?” Austin asks.
“I’m programming the door to open in an hour,” I say.
I could kill them, but I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t even be thinking about it. Why am I enjoying thinking about it?
******
We run for several kilometers, walking only as needed for Zera to catch her breath. She’s in great shape, but she isn’t accustomed to the thin air at this altitude; or the steep terrain. When we start seeing hikers along the trails, we finally relax into a stiff walking pace. Dad once told me that when he was a kid, nobody hiked or did any exercise at all, but that there’s been renewed interest since …
He never finished the sentence. Renewed interest in exercise began when people started reading the Bible, but he never connected the dots back to being tortured. He’d never take credit for what he did. Dad viewed it as God’s work, rather than his own.
“It’s been over an hour,” Zera says.
“There have been no drones in the skies searching for us. The men we trapped should be out by now, and the one we talked to should have given a description.”
“It was pretty dark in there …” I say, “… and he was pretty scared. He may not be able to give a good description.”
“Even so, you’d expect drones to be tracking everyone within ten kilometers, given what we just did,” Zera says.
Austin has barely said a word since we left the mountain. Now that we’re walking, his right hand barely leaves his pants pocket. Even when we were running, he kept tapping his pocket, as if he was checking to be sure something was safely in it.
“Then maybe they did something foolish,” I say. “… like trying to blast the doors open. Maybe they trapped themselves inside.”
Austin stops and turns to face me.
“Spill it, Jocie,” he says. “What do you know? More to the point, what did you do?”
I say nothing.
“C’mon, Jocie. Whenever you start presenting alternative theories; it’s because you already know the real answer and you’re trying to hide it.”
“Fine,” I say. “I didn’t set the door to open in an hour. It will open in two days. They have plenty of air and water. Besides, there’s probably already another bus full of their buddies trying to get them out. I’m sure it’s mild compared to what they would have done to us, and it must be mild compared to what they did to …”
I don’t want to finish the sentence. I start to turn away from him and Zera, but Austin grabs my shoulder and spins me back.
“Dad,” he finishes the sentence for me. “Don’t tell me you did that for Dad, because it’s the last thing he would have wanted. He never would have asked for anyone else to suffer in that place. He’d rather … he’d rather …”
His hand slides back into his pants pocket, while his chin lowers to his chest. Austin is usually happy and carefree, but right now he looks like the weight of the world has been placed on his shoulders.
“Austin?” Zera says, and places her hand on his arm.
His right hand is balled into a fist inside his pocket.
“I’m not ready,” he says. “Albert has been telling me for years that someday I’d do something special, but I’m not ready. I don’t want it to be my turn.”
Zera withdraws her hand.
“What’s the deal with your family?” Zera asks. “Why is everything secrets and riddles? You just accused Jocie of knowing more than she’s telling, and now you’re doing it.”
“Dad always said that knowledge can be painful,” Austin says.
A tear rolls down his cheek and his fist tightens even more in his pocket.
“Austin. What’s in your right hand,” I ask.
“Something I don’t want,” he says. “But now it’s mine, whether I want it or not.”
He brings his hand out of his pocket and opens it - to reveal Dad’s gold wedding band.
Zera gasps.
“Where’d you get that?” she asks.
“It was on the cuff, inside the mountain. He must have left it for me … to pass the torch to me.”
“No,” Zera says. “It’s not real.”
Austin hands the ring to me. On the inside I see the words “Not Today” engraved.
“It’s real,” I say.
Now tears start to run down her cheeks as well.
“It’s just his ring,” I say. “He must have left it there for a reason. We’ll give it back to him when we find him.”
Zera looks at me with disbelief.
“It’s his ring, Jocie! It’s the ring that wouldn’t come off no matter how much they beat him, or whipped him, or starved him. The only way that ring came off his finger is if he’s …”
“…creating a puzzle,” I say. “The ring is a piece in a puzzle!”
“…dead,” she says. “I was going to say the ring is only off … if he’s dead.”
“Zera? How did you know the layout of the complex?”
“Your Dad thought I should know it, so he asked me to memorize it. He said I might visit someday and …”
Zera stands with her mouth open.
“…he said it was easy to get lost in there.”
“Austin?” I say. “The film of Dad’s time inside the mountain wasn’t allowed in our house. What made you stand between the posts and reach out for the cuffs?”
“Dad showed me the film last year,” he says.
“But he didn’t let me watch it,” I say. “Maybe it was so I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions about the ring being off his finger, like you and anyone else who might find it would. Everything we’ve seen so far has been personal. It’s a puzzle only we can solve.”
“What does that mean?” Zera asks. “Are you saying we have to get inside your father’s head to figure this whole thing out? How can anyone possibly do that?”
“Not ‘we’,” Austin says.
“The only one who has a chance at getting inside Dad’s head is Jocie. Her mind works just like his.”
“Then what does the ring mean?” Zera asks.
I realize that I have no clue, which is when it hits me…
To help Austin do whatever it is that he needs to do, I have to solve a puzzle created by Cephas Paulson! What if I can’t do it?
“For the record,” I say, “… getting inside a Paulson brain isn’t difficult. The hard part is finding your way back out again.”