She understands I want her to stay, so she does.
I’d love to take my dog with me. I’d love to take Micah. But all this time I’ve always done things on my own, and that’s how it’s worked best.
So I’m going to do this alone too.
When I’m outside, I scrawl out a quick note and leave it in the crack of the camper door for Micah.
Then I take my pack, my rifle, hunting knife, and my handgun, and I climb on the motorcycle to drive away.
On the note I wrote this:
Leaving to check something out. Take care of Molly for me. I’ll be back before dark. I’ll explain then. Kat.
21
I estimatedsix hours to make it to the Holy Compound, and I make it in just over five.
I had to stop at the abandoned township to siphon off more gas to fill up the motorcycle and pray the filled tank will be enough to take me there and back. I don’t make a single stop from the township to the spot beyond the river where all the stories I’ve heard said the Holy Rollers’ compound was built.
My gas tank shows a little more than half a tank when the large walled community comes into sight, which I take as a sign that any god left in existence is on my side and not theirs.
The compound, however, is twice the size I was expecting.
It’s enormous. The largest community I’ve seen since one city after another fell after Impact.
As soon as I catch my first glimpse, I veer off the road and find a trail through the nearby woods. The road I’ve been following was never a large one. It’s not the kind that droves or large gangs would ever take. But the Holy Rollers travel in groups of two or four, and the last thing I want to do is run into any of them.
The trail is not much of a trail. After a while, it’s too overgrown to even get the motorcycle through. So I hide the vehicle in the underbrush, gathering up dried leaves and dead branches to cover it completely. Then I strap my rifle on my back, check my spare ammunition for both the rifle and the handgun in my holster, hook my canteen full of water on my belt next to binoculars, and follow the trail uphill.
I chose well. Not only does the trail keep me out of sight in the woods, it also leads up one of the higher hills in the area. When I reach the top and clear the thick trees, I can see all the way down to the river and the Holy Compound, which clearly used to be a small river town.
Now it’s a fortress. The inner wall is higher than the walls around any other community in this region. It surrounds the town proper, and inside that perimeter are some large central buildings of two or three stories, a huge church with a tall steeple, and a lot of smaller structures that are clearly houses built with cookie-cutter sameness.
In between the tall inner wall and the outer wall is a huge farm with wide fields for planting, an impressive greenhouse, and large pastures of cows, goats, horses, andsheep. On closer inspection with my binoculars, I also see chickens, ducks, geese, and pigs. Also a handful of animals that look like alpaca. And a large pond I’d guess is for cultivated fish.
There are more houses scattered through the farm, and on the far side is the largest building in the entire compound. I can’t see inside, so I have no idea what it’s used for.
No wonder people are willing to give up their independence and submit to a hard-line moral regime to join up. That place down there is like a fantasy of safety and provision in the middle of a hard, uncertain world.
I’d guess there are at least a thousand people living in the compound. There are guards posted at both the inner and outer walls.
If Burgundy is inside there, I’m not sure how I’ll ever find her.
And even if I do, how the hell will Micah and I ever get her out?
I’ve given myself an hour to scout things out, but after that I’ll need to start back home if I want to reach the township to gas up and then return to Micah, Molly, and the camper before dark.
But that gives me plenty of time to do a more thorough inspection. I start on the east end and use my binoculars in slow, steady sweeps up and down the visible parts of the compound.
I’m close enough that, with my binoculars, I can seedetails of people outside the inner wall. But most of the people are in the center, and the height of the wall keeps me from seeing much of anything inside there except the tops of the buildings. Plus all I have to go on with Burgundy is the face I recall from the old photo of her Micah carries in his pack.
She was in college back then. It’s been years of difficult living and deprivation. Who knows what she looks like now?
Plus every woman I catch a glimpse of is wearing exactly the same kind of plain dress.
Gross. It’s like some sort of Handmaid situation down there. Worse than I imagined.
No matter how stupid their choices might have been in the past, no woman deservesthat.
