The state never arrives to confront Eden’s Gate. The world still goes to war. Mary May finds herself in a bunker with the man she shares an unwanted history with.
I revived this from my drafts and thought I’d post this here since I’m not sure if I’ll finish the other unfinished sections for AO3! Spoilers for Far Cry: Absolution.
*****
Driving down a public road with a carload of beer and liquor shouldn’t have Mary May white knuckling the wheel at the prospect of sirens behind her regardless that the car is Jerome’s and nobody has ever looked twice. As a man of God he’s an unlikely trafficking accomplice, but he approved of flouting the Peggie-led county prohibition on the transportation of alcohol.
The pistol holstered at her hip isn’t for the cops, it’s for the cult.
—the air goes white, dims, and goes white again as the warhead detonates over one of Montana’s not-distant-enough, still-operating nuclear silos.
The autumn dry answers the flash with quick-kindling fire. Mary May’s grip presses the blood from her knuckles as she floors it toward the nearest homestead she knows. She shuts her eyes as each successive flash burns blinding white as Montana’s buried missiles vaporize unlaunched.
She can’t reconcile the clouds mushrooming toward the stratosphere with reality. Even as the first bomb’s blast wave catches her, even as the car flips, the bottles shatter and the air fills with the sour of alcohol, the surreality – dissociation – empowers her to climb out the busted out window and, bleeding arms sliced by the glass, run for the house.
She’s the second person there.
Her heart drops so low the weight of her own feet crushes her pulse beneath them faced with a man as vile to her as John Seed shadowed by the smoke-darkened sky and hued orange by spreading wildfires.
She would have given the world to run to human company.
Now, she would give the world to have arrived alone.
Glass-cut, bleeding arms stinging, she unholsters her gun.
One hand merely rests on his pistol, the other raised placatingly, his eyes beseeching. She knows intimately his every semblance of human emotion is serpentine manipulation.
“We don’t have to kill each other, Mary May. I already promised I’ll always help you.” He smiles. There’s an unkind force of compulsion beneath his words as he says: “You know I meant it, because you’re not in prison. I protected you from the consequences of your actions.”
“You blackmailed me. If you really think I’m waiting out nuclear fallout with you, of anybody…”
“I think my brother was right. We can litigate it later, once we’re safe.”
She hates to concede the point, but she has no reason to antagonize him and risk dying before she even attempts to survive. She lowers her gun. He takes his hand off the pistol grip.
Survival becomes the imperative. Her heart-stopping concern that the bunker might not open to them in the time it takes to rifle the homestead for a key is alleviated when John produces his own copy. Of course he has one. Nieasha and Devon Howard surrendered their property to pad his vast portfolio when they became his converts.
Mary May pulls the hatch secure behind them and joins him at the bottom of the ladder.
He looks down at his watch under the bunker’s stark artificial light.
“I think we made it in under ten minutes. Or at least we’re not far enough over to just go ahead and croak.”
Suddenly swamped with emotion, exhaustion, and the pain of her lacerated arms, she moves stunned past him to drop onto the old plaid couch. Looking down at her shredded skin, she begins picking out slivers of glass.
Head underwater, she is aware he gets on the radio but she ignores him totally until she discovers him standing before her with a first aid kit he’s scrounged from the prepper stash.
She searches the deceptively boyish face of the man she despises. She swallows around the knot in her throat. Her voice sticks:
“It’s gone. Montana. The Spread Eagle. Just… gone. Everything.”
“We’re not,” he says. His weight depresses the couch cushion beside her. “God must still have a purpose for you.”
John Seed has slunk around the periphery of Mary May’s life for going on the greater part of it, an unnerving man who revealed himself in his full callous horror in a room wallpapered with human skin. He wets cotton balls with alcohol and cleans her wounds with hands as careful now as they had been sadistic with his tattoo gun in hand. He tweezes stinging splinters from the wounds with nearly-painless efficiency.
“What kind of God would create a world as evil as this?” she says.
“The devil is the ruler of this world. His reign is ending, and despite your refusal to atone for your sins, your baptism preserved you. God has chosen you to live on in Paradise.”
He believes that to the bottom of his frigid heart.
She faces the value of his continued faith in her election, remembering how close the bullet meant to end her life fired from the gun of his sycophant struck the dirt before John changed perspectives on if he meant her to die or live. She holds back from challenging his conviction.
She studies him as he wraps her wounds: well groomed, but not clowned up like a lawyer, this set of once-expensive clothes now part of his everyday rotation, dirtied and, in places, frayed.
She hates him the most when he’s roving town looking slick in a suit and tie, the tattoos that have proliferated across his skin over the years covered except for the ink on his hands. He’s even more dangerous with a briefcase than with a pistol, remaking the landscape of Hope County in his brother’s fanatical image.
Generations of history vanished with his every transaction. Family businesses passed into his cult’s hands. Happy homes emptied to hollow shells.
These familiar resentments plunge into the shattering knowledge that fires rage above them.
Every family’s story has been wiped from the face of this land, and not by John Seed.
She lurches off the couch, staggering the narrow width of the bunker to plant her palm on the cold concrete wall and vomit up her truck stop lunch, splattering the floor with a mush that used to be bread and fries and pink hot dog.
“We are going to smell that for days,” John says with annoyance behind her.
Of course he’s alright with this.
Of course he is.
He’s wanted this. Looked forward to it. People are dead and dying, even more will die sick from radiation poisoning, covered in burns and sores with their organs failing, and he’s glad for it.
As glad as he was she pulled the trigger and blew her brother's brains out the top of his head to spray into the smoke-choked air and splatter the Montana soil.
She grits her bile-sour teeth and sneers at the wall she remains resting heavily against. Her heart pounds against her ribs in sudden fury. Her voice drips condescension:
“Your brother didn’t get dicked down by God. He just listens to the news.”
John’s humanity disappears.
“Watch how you speak about him.”
She rounds on him.
“Go ahead and shoot me, John. My rotting body will smell worse than my lunch before it’s safe to chuck me out.”
The icy rage souring his expression makes a cagey retreat toward calm.
“There’s no reason for blasphemy. I didn’t cause you to shoot Drew, and Joseph didn’t cause this. Things will become clearer to you, now.”
She declines to respond, going to look for a towel to clean up her puke with and then washing it in the sink with as little water as possible, wondering what kind of recycling system they’re on.
Their tensions disappear into purpose.
They begin inventorying their supplies, counting cans and mason jars. There is an ample stock of beer and liquor, though less here than was lost with Jerome’s car. Mary May knows from the stony remove with which John regards it that he’s considering disposing of it, but with both their energy beginning to flag he chooses to wait to however-inevitably harp about sobriety.
They finish their inventory and take turns splashing water on their faces before eyeing the bunks where, she realizes, they’ll be spending a period of time stretching toward an unknown horizon just feet apart.
“I’m more of a top bunk sleeper,” she says, thinking of early childhood and Drew, the little brother she'd loved and thought she'd known, but then offers with more generosity than she feels: “Unless you are.”
“I was mostly an only child,” he says, baffling her. He doesn’t explain except to say: “You should have read his book.”
Whatever he means, the point washes out to him taking a seat on the bottom bunk as he strips his shirt off.
It’s a little unfair, she starts to think, that despite having breasts nobody thinks once when men–
She doesn’t finish the thought. Although she’s seen the scars he so proudly bears on his chest, and she’s seen his shirtless brother, she’s never caught sight of the extent of his self-mutilation: more sins, some crossed out; his favorite word, YES, large on his abdomen; straight streaks of keloids shining across his shoulders in the electric light that don’t share the same controlled style, like lashes.
She remembers his tattoo gun stabbing its needles into her, the vicious pain he inflicted inking her down to the bone. He’s promised to cut a single strip of her flesh from her, someday, but it seems he’s made a long habit of carving up his own.
“Did your brother hurt you like this?”
He looks surprised to be asked.
“Nothing that wasn’t reciprocal. We believe in self discipline.” Placidly, he adds: “You’ll come to understand this, too.”
–a conversation-ending reminder he’s a psychopath.
She retreats the scant distance the upper berth permits.
*****
The scratch of Mary May’s pencil fills the quiet of the bunker, the calculations she scribbles on the paper ripped from one of the Howard’s notebooks familiar from years of taking stock of the Spread Eagle’s kitchen, beer, and liquor.
She slides the paper with their tallied list of supplies across the table for John’s inspection.
“Two years.”
He no more than glances over it, trusting her expertise, and nods.
“That’s far more than enough. We can try to join the others, eventually, when it’s safer to walk the fallout. It’s not a priority with this much to eat.”
Her brow furrows above the line her lips press to.
“They don’t need you to lead them?”
Blue eyes stunning in the cool white electric light stare clear and calm into hers. John smiles.
“I am the voice crying out ‘In the wilderness prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.’ I’ve played my role in this.”
She had resented him painfully, inartfully tattooing ‘envy’ she hadn’t felt into her flesh. A wellspring of envy she doesn’t deny bursts forth in her chest. He’d been right too early. She longs for his faith, as delusional as it obviously is.
She rubs her dry eyes, willing back tears. She cried last night while he slept the sleep of the righteous. She promises herself she won’t shed a tear while he’s watching.
His focus narrows. He’s looking straight through her eyes to rifle through her weaknesses.
“It would be better for you if you atone before I bring you to the Project,” he says.
“Shut up, John.”
His fingertips drum tabletop alongside their inventory.
“We have time.”
“You talked to them, on the radio?”
“There had been a danger the bunkers could be misflagged as active silos. God preserved us. All three arks were spared from the strikes. A new world’s coming.”
“I’m…” She couldn’t bring herself to say ‘glad’, or anything like it. She offered a weak, pained smile in place of it, and said: “Excuse me if I believe that last part when I see it.”
“You know, I like your defiance. But it’s no secret I’ve always liked you, Mary May.” He held up a placating hand. “You think I’m a creep, and it’s not mutual.”
She blows a strand of hair from her face, slinging an arm over the back of her chair as she slouches against its back.
“At least let me be the one to say it.”
Grief’s terrible shadow suddenly engulfs her.
Paralysis spreads through her limbs. She wants to scream herself hoarse. She wants to kick the chair over onto the concrete floor. She imagines her fist striking the wall until her knuckles split.
She can’t raise her voice above a whisper, saying:
“Don’t you care, just a little?”
He slides the hand resting beside their inventory millimeters forward across the table, a strictly metered gesture at connection.
“I can’t. You wouldn’t either, if you were me. My brother thinks it’s my least laudable trait. I don’t want to tell you a thing about it. I think I will, when we’re bored enough for that.”
She dizzies with the aching thought of all the people she may never see again. Casey. Jerome. The neighbors who filled the seats of the bar she inherited from her mom and dad — people from all walks of life she chatted and laughed whose cares she eased with liquor, yes, but more so as a friendly face with a friendly ear.
“Don’t hold back on my account,” John says.
By the time she’s stopped screaming her throat’s torn raw. She’s staring at the chair she smashed into the wall. The first day of sheltering in place, and she’ll already have to straighten the leg.
She collapses onto the concrete, sobbing and snotting. She wipes her eyes on her bandaged forearm, thinks better of it, and uselessly shakes her arm out as if it could dissipate the salty damp sooner.
The dirt-backed walls eat sound, the devastated world outside hidden distant and muted.
She could no more hold back the grief than she can believe she let him watch her.
“Go away?”
The legs of his chair scrape on the concrete. He passes her, shutting the door to the deeper bunker.
