The Children of Red Peak
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Synopsis
David Young, Deacon Price, and Beth Harris live with a dark secret. As children, they survived a religious group's horrific last days at the isolated mountain Red Peak. Years later, the trauma of what they experienced never feels far behind. When a fellow survivor commits suicide, they finally reunite and share their stories. Long-repressed memories surface, defying understanding and belief. Why did their families go down such a dark road? What really happened on that final night? The answers lie buried at Red Peak. But truth has a price, and escaping a second time may demand the ultimate sacrifice.
Release date: November 17, 2020
Publisher: Redhook
Print pages: 384
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The Children of Red Peak
Craig DiLouie
After years of outrunning the past, David Young now drove straight toward it.
His Toyota hummed south along the I-5 as the sun melted into the coastal horizon. The lemon trees flanking the road faded into dusk. Most nights, he enjoyed the solitude of driving. He’d roll down the window and disappear in the sound of his tires lapping the asphalt, soothing as a Tibetan chant.
Not this time. California was burning again.
The news blamed the wildfire on a lightning strike in the sequoias. Dried out by the changing climate, the forest went up like a match. Outside the car, the air was toxic. A crimson glow silhouetted the Sierra Nevadas like a mirror sunset.
Red Peak called to him from all that fire and ash.
David turned on the radio to drown out his memories. He’d spent years forgetting. In all that time, he hadn’t kept in touch with the others. He hadn’t even told his wife about the horrors he’d survived. Claire believed he was visiting a client and not on his way to the funeral of an old friend to whom he owed a debt.
He didn’t want to go, but Emily was dead, and he had her letter.
I couldn’t fight it anymore, she’d written in flowing cursive.
All those years ago, five children survived. Now there were four.
He found a parking space at the All Faiths Funeral Home and cut the engine. Cars filled the lot. A sizable crowd had come to attend Emily’s wake, friends and family who wanted to say goodbye.
Whatever happiness she’d found hadn’t been enough for her.
He turned on the overhead light to inspect his appearance in the rearview. People said he had both charisma and looks, a genetic gift from his mother. Under dark, wavy hair, his angular face was sensitive and inspired trust.
Tonight, wild eyes stared back at him, the eyes of a man he didn’t know or had forgotten. The eyes of a scared little boy.
You have children you love more than anything, he told his reflection. You have a job that allows you to help people escape the worst of what you suffered. You’re alive. The past isn’t real. It’s dead and gone.
“I’ll be okay,” he thought aloud and opened the car door.
The warm night air smelled like an old brick fireplace. The mountains burned in the east, bright and close.
David turned his back on the view and lit a cigarette, a crutch he revisited in times of stress. He took a long drag, but it tasted terrible and only made him fidget more. He ground it under his shoe and went into the funeral home.
Black-clad mourners filled the foyer and lobby, mingling in the air-conditioned atmosphere heavily scented with fresh-cut flowers and sharp cleaners and the acrid tinge of wood smoke. Organ music droned over the murmur.
Stomach rolling, David scanned the faces. There was nobody here he recognized. He stood in awkward tension on the thick carpet. He should visit Emily’s body and say goodbye, but he wasn’t ready for that, not yet.
Then he saw her. Emily, still a child, reaching to tuck her long blond hair behind her ear, a frequent gesture he remembered well.
His heart lurched. He was seeing a ghost.
A man sat on the folding chair next to the girl and stroked her hair while she frowned at a tablet resting on her lap. On her other side, a towheaded boy played with his own device.
Her children, he realized. Around the age of his own kids. The girl was about the same age as David when he first met Emily in 2002.
They slouched in their chairs, miserable and bored. They didn’t understand how profoundly their world had changed, not yet. After his mother died, David had taken a long time to process as well. A stabbing pain of homesickness stuck in his chest. He missed his own children back in Fresno, safe in Claire’s care, still naive to how cruel the world could be.
The man caught him staring and rose to his feet with a scowl.
David held out his hand. “You must be Emily’s husband.”
“Nick.” His breath was thick with whiskey. “Who are you?”
“David Young. I’m sorry for your loss, Nick.”
Still protective, distrustful. “How did you know Emily?”
“We grew up together.”
The man’s scowl softened until he wasn’t looking at David at all. Emily’s suicide had broken him. “Where did…?”
David waited until the silence became awkward, then said, “She was a very good friend. In fact, I was just thinking how much your daughter resembles her back when I knew her.”
He and Emily used to talk about how all they had was each other, how they’d spend the rest of their lives protecting each other.
“She never mentioned you.” Nick shambled back to his kids.
David released the breath he’d been holding and retreated as well. He found himself walking without direction among the black-clad mourners, who murmured in small groups and shot him curious glances as he passed. He’d always had a difficult time sitting still, but now he had a purpose for it. As long as he appeared he had somewhere to go, nobody could draw him into conversation, and the mourners would remain raw impressions instead of real people.
He reached into the pocket where he kept his phone. He thought about going outside to call Claire and tell her he’d arrived safe at his hotel. If he did, however, he might not come back inside. Instead, he edged closer to the viewing room.
On the far side, Emily’s white casket lay surrounded by arrangements of lilies, carnations, roses, orchids, and hydrangeas. He glimpsed slender lifeless hands clasped over her breast. At the doorway, a large poster mounted on an easel displayed photos of her life. Emily smiling at the camera, holding a baby, hugging her children, posing with her family.
David found it jarring to see her grown-up. She was still so familiar, but the intervening years had turned her into a stranger. His breath left him in a gasp as nearly fifteen years rushed past in an instant.
Her smile was still the same, however. A smile that lit up the room. He leaned for a closer look at a photo of her on a windy beach at twilight.
How did you fool them all for so long? he thought.
Or maybe she’d fooled herself.
A familiar voice said: “I thought I was gonna find you hiding in a closet.”
Again, a strange sense of vertigo. He wheeled to find a teenage boy wearing a comfortable grin. The boy morphed into a man.
David shook his head and smiled. “You’re still an asshole, Deacon.”
Now in his late twenties, Deacon Price appeared much the same skinny kid with his boyish face and easy smirk. But he’d styled his shaggy hair into an emo swoop that shadowed one eye, and he wore a black T-shirt, leather wristbands, jeans, and Chucks. His shirt advertised he liked HOT WATER MUSIC. An odd choice for a funeral. Then again, Deacon’s outfit struck David as some kind of uniform.
A long time ago, they’d been best friends.
“You dyed your hair black,” David said after a tight hug. He didn’t mention the tattoos that covered his friend’s arms.
“And you got older.”
“Okay, let me guess.” He made a show of studying Deacon. “Stock broker.”
“Nice try.” Deacon chuckled. “Musician. My turn.” He took in David’s black suit, white dress shirt, black tie, and shiny shoes. “Bible salesman?”
David snorted. “Hardly.”
“Then you must be a cult deprogrammer.”
“Wow, how did you know?”
His friend rolled his eyes. “It’s called Google, dude.”
“Right.” David flushed with a little embarrassment. He’d never checked up on his old friends. “I’m an exit counselor, though, not a deprogrammer.”
Usually paid by the family of a cult member, deprogrammers retrained a person out of their belief system, and some used kidnapping and confinement. Exit counseling was voluntary, more like an addiction intervention.
“Whatever you say.” Deacon shrugged, the difference lost on him. “Did you think I wasn’t coming? I assume you got the same letter I did.”
“I don’t know what I was expecting.” David thought about it. “Now that I’ve come all this way, I feel funny, like I don’t belong here. Don’t you? Whatever life Emily made for herself, I wasn’t part of it.”
Deacon’s eyes roamed the room until settling on Nick. “On the other hand, these people weren’t a part of her life with us. I don’t think they even know.”
“You talked to Nick, her husband?”
His friend ignored the question. “Which do you think was the real Emily?”
David shook his head, which hurt just thinking about it. He was having a hard time processing who he even was right now. “I need a smoke.”
“Excellent idea.”
They emerged in the dim parking lot.
Deacon lit a cigarette. “Is Angela coming?”
David leaned against the funeral home’s brick wall and blew a stream of smoke. “I seriously doubt it.”
“Why not?”
“She’s angry.”
Deacon snorted. “So some things don’t change.”
“Only she’s a police detective now, so it’s even scarier when she gets mad.”
“I wonder what she made of Emily’s letter.”
“I know she’s mad at Emily for doing what she did.” David didn’t want to talk about his big sister, with whom he rarely kept in touch. He gazed across the parking lot toward the distant red glow. “Jesus. Look at it. I hope it rains soon.”
Deacon cast his own eyes toward the fire. “Two million acres going up this year, all thanks to climate change. The ol’ Reverend was right. The world’s coming to an end. Only it’s happening so slowly, hardly anybody is noticing.”
He didn’t want to talk about the Reverend either. “So how are you, Deek? How’s life been treating you?”
Deacon pursed his lips. “Uh, good, David. How about you?”
“I’m doing good. Real good.”
They smoked in silence for a while, which suited David just fine. Nothing stirred among the cars parked in the dark lot. Deacon seemed to want to pick up where things left off years earlier. David was one bad vibe away from fleeing to his car. A little small talk wouldn’t hurt. A little quiet.
His friend had never known how to take things slow. He seemed ready to talk everything out. He’d read Emily’s letter and found some hidden meaning.
David gazed toward his car, which promised the safe routines of home.
A woman emerged from the gloom to pose with her hands on her hips. “You boys. I leave you alone for fifteen years, and look what you get up to.”
Beth Harris was still petite, though she’d filled out in womanhood, and her long, straight, sandy hair was pulled back in a bun instead of flowing free around her shoulders. Otherwise, the years had done little to age her pixie face.
David hugged her. “It’s really nice to see you.”
She patted his shoulder. “You were brave to come.”
He released her, and she and Deacon regarded each other with goofy grins. They stepped into an embrace that was far friendlier than the one she’d given David.
Get a room, David heard his twelve-year-old self say.
At last, they let go, though the tension between them hung in the air.
“Look at you.” She appraised Deacon. “Rock ’n’ roll star.”
“You’d never guess what put me on this path.”
“We’re going to talk,” she said and turned to David. “But we’re going to take it slow.” She reached into her purse and produced a silver flask. “I brought a little bottled courage to guide us on the path.”
David smiled as Beth handed it over. The strong scent alone braced him. Rum. The alcohol burned down his throat with a warm, fuzzy aftermath. He passed the flask to Deacon, who tossed his head back in a long swallow.
Beth shot David a questioning glance. “No Angela, huh?”
“Nope.”
Deacon stared at the distant fire. “God, look at it now.” The fiery glow shimmered and pulsed in a natural light show. “It reminds me… Listen. Can I tell you guys something about the last night at the mountain?”
Beth raised her hand. “Going slow, remember?”
Deacon shuddered and took another long swig. “Okay.”
“So. Have either of you visited Emily yet?”
They shook their heads.
“Then we should tear off that Band-Aid first.” Her large brown eyes flickered between them. “We can visit her together.”
David produced his box of Marlboros. “I need a quiet moment. You guys go ahead.”
“We have to say goodbye.” Beth rested her hand on his arm. “Once you do, you’ll take all that weight off your shoulders.”
He put away his cigarettes. “All right.”
They entered the funeral home and threaded the crowd toward the viewing room. David’s heart crashed like a rock flung at a brick wall.
Beth slipped her hand into his. “I’m right here with you.”
He answered with a vague nod. There was no controlling his legs anymore. He simply floated toward the casket. Emily lay with her hands clasped as if to hide where she’d parted the flesh of her arms with a razor.
Memories flashed across his vision, which fragmented into puzzle pieces. Emily sat next to him in a dark supply closet. Gripped his hand while his mother purified herself in the Temple. Said goodbye the day they left for separate foster homes and promised they’d be together again, as it was meant to be.
He groaned as Emily’s corpse rematerialized before him. Sweat soaked through his dress shirt. He was shaking. Was going to be sick. The stress of revisiting the past. All the smoke in the atmosphere. Something he ate.
Beth guided him out the door into the open air. “You’re having a panic attack.”
David stood outside on trembling legs. His blood roared in his ears, his heart about to burst. His car seemed miles away. He spotted a row of camellias planted around the base of the funeral home and burrowed into them to sit on the mulch with his back against the rough wall.
“Look at me.” Beth crouched to face him. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’re safe. Just breathe, okay? In through your nose for a few seconds, now out through your mouth, nice and slow. That’s right. You’ve got it. It’ll pass soon. I’ll stay with you as long as you want me to.”
David wiped cold sweat from his face. His tears were warm. “I’m stupid.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I thought I was safe.”
“You are safe.”
He wagged his head. “All I did was find a bigger place to hide.”
2002
The orange U-Haul truck chewed long miles along the endless highway, bound for California from Idaho. The vehicle was a fifteen footer, the biggest vehicle David had ever ridden in. After sitting half the day in the middle seat between Mom and Angela, however, the novelty had worn off, and he was carsick and bored and worried about the future.
Mom tapped the steering wheel, singing along to a Christian radio station. She wore a T-shirt and jeans. Sweat glistened on her forehead despite the air-conditioning. She’d tied her hair into an austere ponytail. She shook her head as she drove past an exit leading to a small town.
“Another dead end,” she said. “Dead and don’t know it yet.”
Mom talked a lot about the war that was coming. Eleven months earlier, terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center. The coming war would be the big one, she said, and the start of even bigger wars to come. Millions would die, heralding a dark age leading up to the end of the world.
“Who’s dead?” David said.
“Nobody, Davey.” Her mouth formed a grim smile. “Right now, they’re just sleeping. They’ll wake up soon, you can count on that. They’ll be wide awake when it all goes down.”
When she talked about the apocalypse, she sounded strangely happy.
For David’s nine-year-old brain, it was the stuff of nightmares. God loved him, and he was therefore safe, but he didn’t like the idea of God hating everyone else.
Mom had told him the next time God destroyed the world, he’d do it with fire.
She nudged him with her elbow. “You ready for it, Davey?”
He shrugged. “I guess so.”
“When Jesus comes, you have to be prepared.”
“I’m ready.” He liked this part. While God was scary, Jesus was kind. David prayed to him every night. No matter how much his parents fought, Jesus had kept him safe.
“Can I get an amen?”
David grinned. “Amen!”
“Praise God.”
Angela sighed as she gazed out the window. “I don’t see why we can’t get ready in Twin Falls, where I have friends and a life.”
“When are we going to see Dad again?” David said.
Mom’s face turned dark with alarming suddenness. “Don’t make me the bad guy for taking care of you the best way I can.”
“I was happy,” Angela said, leaving the rest unspoken. She believed Mom was taking care of herself. David had heard it all before.
Mom gripped the wheel hard enough to turn her knuckles white. “Your father’s starting a new life. It’s about time we did the same.”
This was news to David. “What new life is Dad starting?”
Mom turned up the radio and didn’t answer. In a gravelly voice, the radio preacher said the world’s sinners didn’t listen any better than Pharaoh did when Moses warned him, and for that they’d suffer, just as the Egyptians had.
Mom’s smile returned full force as she said, “Amen.”
Outside of Reno, the U-Haul pulled off the interstate. Mom drove toward a Chevron and maneuvered the truck next to the pumps. The hot, dry air reeked of gasoline fumes and desert dust.
She shoved her credit card into the slot and removed the pump handle. “They have restrooms here. Anybody who has to go, do it now, and don’t be long.”
Angela said, “Can I go in and buy a drink?”
Mom thrust her hand into the pocket of her jeans and handed over a few crumpled bills. “Nothing with caffeine. Get something for your brother too. And take the thermos and fill it up with water.”
David climbed out of the cab, happy to stretch his legs. He’d been holding his bladder in check since Winnemucca. His body broke out in sweat from the day’s scorching heat that waved above the asphalt. He followed Angela into the air-conditioned convenience store and stopped in front of the candy racks.
“You can’t have any of that,” his sister said.
“I can look.”
“I’ll buy you some peanuts.”
“Okay.” David walked off to find the restroom.
Inside, fluorescent lights glared across white tile. A man wearing a baseball cap and jeans stood shaving at the sink with the water running. The man’s eyes flickered in his reflection to gaze back at him. He winked, then went back to pulling a razor over his lathered jaw.
David put his head down and entered one of the stalls. He locked the door and raised the seat. Outside the stall, the water turned off. The bathroom became dead quiet except for the man humming while he shaved.
He couldn’t go. Peeing would make noise, which would call attention to himself. He waited for the man to either leave or turn the faucet on again, but neither happened. Pushing it out didn’t work. It was stuck.
“Niagara Falls,” he whispered.
Nothing.
He thought about what his best friend Ajay Patel might be doing back home. Ajay’s parents stayed together and didn’t fight. Nobody dragged him on a boring car ride to a whole other state to start a new life. He wondered if Ajay was one of the sinners who would be destroyed.
David wished he was Ajay.
Outside, the bathroom door cracked open. “Davey?”
Fear paralyzed him. The man could hear everything. A fierce heat blazed across David’s face and chest, leaving him miserable and nauseous. His bladder about to burst. If he stayed quiet, they’d all go away, the man and his mom both.
“Davey, answer me right now.”
“I’m peeing,” he managed.
“Come on out. I’m not asking twice.”
He zipped up and emerged weeping from the stall. The man turned toward him with a surprised expression, but the tears poured out in a flood, melting David’s vision to a hot blur.
Mom grabbed him by the hand and yanked him through the store and back into the sun.
“I have to pee,” he sobbed.
Angela chased after them. “What happened?”
Mom kept pulling. “You don’t have to go.”
“I do!”
“Then you’ll have to hold it until Sacramento.”
David wailed with fear and shame and self-pity. “I can’t! Please! I’m sorry!”
“Just let him go to the bathroom, Mom,” Angela said.
Mom stopped near the pumps and growled. “Lord, give me strength.”
She led him around the back of the gas station, where he did his business against the white cinder-block wall, moaning with relief.
When he came back, Mom was pacing out in the desert scrub, smoking a cigarette and muttering to herself. David’s shame deepened that he’d troubled her enough to smoke, something she shouldn’t do. She’d changed so much in the last year, when she and Dad started fighting all the time.
He didn’t want her to be upset. He didn’t want her to smoke. Mom had become God and Jesus rolled into one, angry and loving in equal measure. He crossed the dirt lot and said, “I’m sorry, Mom. I’ll be good.”
She quit her pacing and forced a smile. “I know you will, Davey. You’re a good boy in your heart.”
He tramped back to the truck, where Angela waited.
She handed him a bag of peanuts and a cold can of ginger ale. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
His sister glared across the lot toward their mother. “She shouldn’t get so mad. It wasn’t your fault.”
David flinched. “It was.”
“Hey. Hey, stupid.”
“I’m not answering you because I’m not stupid.”
She cupped his chin. “Next time you have a problem you can’t handle, you come to me, okay? You’re too little to take on everything.”
Before his parents’ breakup, David would have yelled back at her that he wasn’t little and that she wasn’t the boss of him. Now he accepted her comfort with a grateful nod while he chewed his peanuts into a dry paste.
David awoke in the parking lot of a Super 8 motel.
“Wait here,” Mom said and got out.
Wiping drool from his mouth, he looked around at cars and asphalt lit by the glow of pole lights. “Where are we?”
“Sacramento.” Angela sighed. “God, this really and truly sucks.”
He stretched. “I’m hungry. What time is it?”
“Just hang tight.”
“Do you think there will be kids there? Where we’re going?”
“It’ll be like going to church every day. It’s all Mom cares about now.”
“Sunday school can be fun sometimes.”
“Yippee.”
The truck door creaked open, and Mom leaned inside. “We’re checked in. Let’s eat some supper before we head up to the room.”
She led them across the street to a bright Denny’s. The host got them seated in a booth and passed out menus and crayons.
David opened his kid’s menu and started coloring the woolly mammoth from Ice Age. “Can I have the chicken tenders and fries, Mom?”
“Spaghetti for me,” Angela said. “And lemonade.”
“Oh, me too, please.”
“You got it.” Mom smiled at them. “Look at us, having an adventure.”
“Can you tell us about this place we’re going now?” Angela asked.
“It’s a community near Tehachapi. They call themselves the Family of the Living Spirit. They’re very selective about who they let in. I sent a letter to Reverend Peale, and he wrote back personally to invite us to join.”
David chewed on the word in his mind. Tehachapi. Mysterious and old. He pictured buffalo and little tendrils of smoke wisping above tepees.
“Where is this place?” Angela said.
“South east of Bakersfield. Not too far from Los Angeles. They live a pure life there, simple and close to God.”
“God kills people,” David blurted.
The smile wavered. “Not us, Davey.”
“Angela said we’ll have to go to church all the time.”
His sister kicked him under the table, but he ignored her. She did say it.
“We’re going to live off the land,” Mom said. “You can grow anything in the Cummings Valley, year round. Lettuce, tomatoes, herbs, spinach. The weather is always gorgeous. It’s a wonderful place for children to grow up.”
David wrinkled his nose. “Spinach?”
“Why is Tehachapi better than Twin Falls?” Angela said.
“The people,” Mom answered. “Everybody at the community lives in harmony with each other and God. I want to be surrounded by people who love me no matter what and won’t hurt me just because they can.”
“Sounds like the life I had back home,” his sister muttered. “Minus the part where we have to grow our own food.”
The server arrived to take their order. While Angela slouched in moody silence, Mom ordered their suppers with a bright smile. David hoped she’d forget what Angela said and remain in a good mood.
After the woman left, the smile vanished. “Your life wasn’t as great as you think it was. The world is chock-full of people who’ll try to take everything from you. They say they love you, but they only love what you can do for them.”
“You don’t know my friends. And you don’t know these people either.”
“The Reverend Peale’s community doesn’t just talk the talk,” Mom said. “They live spiritual lives in accord with God’s laws. Every day is planned out for them, they know exactly what comes next, and they want for nothing. We’ll be happy there. The wilderness will be the safest place to be when it all goes down. In any case, a little hard work in fresh air and a little less TV will do you a world of wonder, Miss Angela.”
His sister slouched even further in her seat, quietly fuming.
“Why does God want to kill everybody?” David asked.
“He doesn’t. Men will destroy the world with their greed and sin. The end will be a time of tribulation and testing.”
“He can stop it, though, right? Why doesn’t he?”
“So Jesus can return to his chosen people in all his glory.”
Put another way, if everyone was good, Jesus wouldn’t come back, though Jesus coming back was what God promised and Mom wanted.
He frowned. “Okay.”
“Don’t think too hard about it,” Mom said. “Feel its truth in your heart.”
The truth was he depended on his mother for everything, and God and Jesus made her happy. As long as they did, he’d love them too. And if he was good enough, maybe God would leave the world alone.
In the blazing heat of day, Mom pulled off the road and parked in the shade of a stand of blue oaks. She unfolded her road map and scrutinized the markings she’d made on it.
“I think we passed the turnoff,” she said.
She frowned at her children as if getting lost was their fault. The black discs of her sunglasses covered her eyes. David didn’t like when she wore sunglasses. Whenever she did, h. . .
His Toyota hummed south along the I-5 as the sun melted into the coastal horizon. The lemon trees flanking the road faded into dusk. Most nights, he enjoyed the solitude of driving. He’d roll down the window and disappear in the sound of his tires lapping the asphalt, soothing as a Tibetan chant.
Not this time. California was burning again.
The news blamed the wildfire on a lightning strike in the sequoias. Dried out by the changing climate, the forest went up like a match. Outside the car, the air was toxic. A crimson glow silhouetted the Sierra Nevadas like a mirror sunset.
Red Peak called to him from all that fire and ash.
David turned on the radio to drown out his memories. He’d spent years forgetting. In all that time, he hadn’t kept in touch with the others. He hadn’t even told his wife about the horrors he’d survived. Claire believed he was visiting a client and not on his way to the funeral of an old friend to whom he owed a debt.
He didn’t want to go, but Emily was dead, and he had her letter.
I couldn’t fight it anymore, she’d written in flowing cursive.
All those years ago, five children survived. Now there were four.
He found a parking space at the All Faiths Funeral Home and cut the engine. Cars filled the lot. A sizable crowd had come to attend Emily’s wake, friends and family who wanted to say goodbye.
Whatever happiness she’d found hadn’t been enough for her.
He turned on the overhead light to inspect his appearance in the rearview. People said he had both charisma and looks, a genetic gift from his mother. Under dark, wavy hair, his angular face was sensitive and inspired trust.
Tonight, wild eyes stared back at him, the eyes of a man he didn’t know or had forgotten. The eyes of a scared little boy.
You have children you love more than anything, he told his reflection. You have a job that allows you to help people escape the worst of what you suffered. You’re alive. The past isn’t real. It’s dead and gone.
“I’ll be okay,” he thought aloud and opened the car door.
The warm night air smelled like an old brick fireplace. The mountains burned in the east, bright and close.
David turned his back on the view and lit a cigarette, a crutch he revisited in times of stress. He took a long drag, but it tasted terrible and only made him fidget more. He ground it under his shoe and went into the funeral home.
Black-clad mourners filled the foyer and lobby, mingling in the air-conditioned atmosphere heavily scented with fresh-cut flowers and sharp cleaners and the acrid tinge of wood smoke. Organ music droned over the murmur.
Stomach rolling, David scanned the faces. There was nobody here he recognized. He stood in awkward tension on the thick carpet. He should visit Emily’s body and say goodbye, but he wasn’t ready for that, not yet.
Then he saw her. Emily, still a child, reaching to tuck her long blond hair behind her ear, a frequent gesture he remembered well.
His heart lurched. He was seeing a ghost.
A man sat on the folding chair next to the girl and stroked her hair while she frowned at a tablet resting on her lap. On her other side, a towheaded boy played with his own device.
Her children, he realized. Around the age of his own kids. The girl was about the same age as David when he first met Emily in 2002.
They slouched in their chairs, miserable and bored. They didn’t understand how profoundly their world had changed, not yet. After his mother died, David had taken a long time to process as well. A stabbing pain of homesickness stuck in his chest. He missed his own children back in Fresno, safe in Claire’s care, still naive to how cruel the world could be.
The man caught him staring and rose to his feet with a scowl.
David held out his hand. “You must be Emily’s husband.”
“Nick.” His breath was thick with whiskey. “Who are you?”
“David Young. I’m sorry for your loss, Nick.”
Still protective, distrustful. “How did you know Emily?”
“We grew up together.”
The man’s scowl softened until he wasn’t looking at David at all. Emily’s suicide had broken him. “Where did…?”
David waited until the silence became awkward, then said, “She was a very good friend. In fact, I was just thinking how much your daughter resembles her back when I knew her.”
He and Emily used to talk about how all they had was each other, how they’d spend the rest of their lives protecting each other.
“She never mentioned you.” Nick shambled back to his kids.
David released the breath he’d been holding and retreated as well. He found himself walking without direction among the black-clad mourners, who murmured in small groups and shot him curious glances as he passed. He’d always had a difficult time sitting still, but now he had a purpose for it. As long as he appeared he had somewhere to go, nobody could draw him into conversation, and the mourners would remain raw impressions instead of real people.
He reached into the pocket where he kept his phone. He thought about going outside to call Claire and tell her he’d arrived safe at his hotel. If he did, however, he might not come back inside. Instead, he edged closer to the viewing room.
On the far side, Emily’s white casket lay surrounded by arrangements of lilies, carnations, roses, orchids, and hydrangeas. He glimpsed slender lifeless hands clasped over her breast. At the doorway, a large poster mounted on an easel displayed photos of her life. Emily smiling at the camera, holding a baby, hugging her children, posing with her family.
David found it jarring to see her grown-up. She was still so familiar, but the intervening years had turned her into a stranger. His breath left him in a gasp as nearly fifteen years rushed past in an instant.
Her smile was still the same, however. A smile that lit up the room. He leaned for a closer look at a photo of her on a windy beach at twilight.
How did you fool them all for so long? he thought.
Or maybe she’d fooled herself.
A familiar voice said: “I thought I was gonna find you hiding in a closet.”
Again, a strange sense of vertigo. He wheeled to find a teenage boy wearing a comfortable grin. The boy morphed into a man.
David shook his head and smiled. “You’re still an asshole, Deacon.”
Now in his late twenties, Deacon Price appeared much the same skinny kid with his boyish face and easy smirk. But he’d styled his shaggy hair into an emo swoop that shadowed one eye, and he wore a black T-shirt, leather wristbands, jeans, and Chucks. His shirt advertised he liked HOT WATER MUSIC. An odd choice for a funeral. Then again, Deacon’s outfit struck David as some kind of uniform.
A long time ago, they’d been best friends.
“You dyed your hair black,” David said after a tight hug. He didn’t mention the tattoos that covered his friend’s arms.
“And you got older.”
“Okay, let me guess.” He made a show of studying Deacon. “Stock broker.”
“Nice try.” Deacon chuckled. “Musician. My turn.” He took in David’s black suit, white dress shirt, black tie, and shiny shoes. “Bible salesman?”
David snorted. “Hardly.”
“Then you must be a cult deprogrammer.”
“Wow, how did you know?”
His friend rolled his eyes. “It’s called Google, dude.”
“Right.” David flushed with a little embarrassment. He’d never checked up on his old friends. “I’m an exit counselor, though, not a deprogrammer.”
Usually paid by the family of a cult member, deprogrammers retrained a person out of their belief system, and some used kidnapping and confinement. Exit counseling was voluntary, more like an addiction intervention.
“Whatever you say.” Deacon shrugged, the difference lost on him. “Did you think I wasn’t coming? I assume you got the same letter I did.”
“I don’t know what I was expecting.” David thought about it. “Now that I’ve come all this way, I feel funny, like I don’t belong here. Don’t you? Whatever life Emily made for herself, I wasn’t part of it.”
Deacon’s eyes roamed the room until settling on Nick. “On the other hand, these people weren’t a part of her life with us. I don’t think they even know.”
“You talked to Nick, her husband?”
His friend ignored the question. “Which do you think was the real Emily?”
David shook his head, which hurt just thinking about it. He was having a hard time processing who he even was right now. “I need a smoke.”
“Excellent idea.”
They emerged in the dim parking lot.
Deacon lit a cigarette. “Is Angela coming?”
David leaned against the funeral home’s brick wall and blew a stream of smoke. “I seriously doubt it.”
“Why not?”
“She’s angry.”
Deacon snorted. “So some things don’t change.”
“Only she’s a police detective now, so it’s even scarier when she gets mad.”
“I wonder what she made of Emily’s letter.”
“I know she’s mad at Emily for doing what she did.” David didn’t want to talk about his big sister, with whom he rarely kept in touch. He gazed across the parking lot toward the distant red glow. “Jesus. Look at it. I hope it rains soon.”
Deacon cast his own eyes toward the fire. “Two million acres going up this year, all thanks to climate change. The ol’ Reverend was right. The world’s coming to an end. Only it’s happening so slowly, hardly anybody is noticing.”
He didn’t want to talk about the Reverend either. “So how are you, Deek? How’s life been treating you?”
Deacon pursed his lips. “Uh, good, David. How about you?”
“I’m doing good. Real good.”
They smoked in silence for a while, which suited David just fine. Nothing stirred among the cars parked in the dark lot. Deacon seemed to want to pick up where things left off years earlier. David was one bad vibe away from fleeing to his car. A little small talk wouldn’t hurt. A little quiet.
His friend had never known how to take things slow. He seemed ready to talk everything out. He’d read Emily’s letter and found some hidden meaning.
David gazed toward his car, which promised the safe routines of home.
A woman emerged from the gloom to pose with her hands on her hips. “You boys. I leave you alone for fifteen years, and look what you get up to.”
Beth Harris was still petite, though she’d filled out in womanhood, and her long, straight, sandy hair was pulled back in a bun instead of flowing free around her shoulders. Otherwise, the years had done little to age her pixie face.
David hugged her. “It’s really nice to see you.”
She patted his shoulder. “You were brave to come.”
He released her, and she and Deacon regarded each other with goofy grins. They stepped into an embrace that was far friendlier than the one she’d given David.
Get a room, David heard his twelve-year-old self say.
At last, they let go, though the tension between them hung in the air.
“Look at you.” She appraised Deacon. “Rock ’n’ roll star.”
“You’d never guess what put me on this path.”
“We’re going to talk,” she said and turned to David. “But we’re going to take it slow.” She reached into her purse and produced a silver flask. “I brought a little bottled courage to guide us on the path.”
David smiled as Beth handed it over. The strong scent alone braced him. Rum. The alcohol burned down his throat with a warm, fuzzy aftermath. He passed the flask to Deacon, who tossed his head back in a long swallow.
Beth shot David a questioning glance. “No Angela, huh?”
“Nope.”
Deacon stared at the distant fire. “God, look at it now.” The fiery glow shimmered and pulsed in a natural light show. “It reminds me… Listen. Can I tell you guys something about the last night at the mountain?”
Beth raised her hand. “Going slow, remember?”
Deacon shuddered and took another long swig. “Okay.”
“So. Have either of you visited Emily yet?”
They shook their heads.
“Then we should tear off that Band-Aid first.” Her large brown eyes flickered between them. “We can visit her together.”
David produced his box of Marlboros. “I need a quiet moment. You guys go ahead.”
“We have to say goodbye.” Beth rested her hand on his arm. “Once you do, you’ll take all that weight off your shoulders.”
He put away his cigarettes. “All right.”
They entered the funeral home and threaded the crowd toward the viewing room. David’s heart crashed like a rock flung at a brick wall.
Beth slipped her hand into his. “I’m right here with you.”
He answered with a vague nod. There was no controlling his legs anymore. He simply floated toward the casket. Emily lay with her hands clasped as if to hide where she’d parted the flesh of her arms with a razor.
Memories flashed across his vision, which fragmented into puzzle pieces. Emily sat next to him in a dark supply closet. Gripped his hand while his mother purified herself in the Temple. Said goodbye the day they left for separate foster homes and promised they’d be together again, as it was meant to be.
He groaned as Emily’s corpse rematerialized before him. Sweat soaked through his dress shirt. He was shaking. Was going to be sick. The stress of revisiting the past. All the smoke in the atmosphere. Something he ate.
Beth guided him out the door into the open air. “You’re having a panic attack.”
David stood outside on trembling legs. His blood roared in his ears, his heart about to burst. His car seemed miles away. He spotted a row of camellias planted around the base of the funeral home and burrowed into them to sit on the mulch with his back against the rough wall.
“Look at me.” Beth crouched to face him. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’re safe. Just breathe, okay? In through your nose for a few seconds, now out through your mouth, nice and slow. That’s right. You’ve got it. It’ll pass soon. I’ll stay with you as long as you want me to.”
David wiped cold sweat from his face. His tears were warm. “I’m stupid.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I thought I was safe.”
“You are safe.”
He wagged his head. “All I did was find a bigger place to hide.”
2002
The orange U-Haul truck chewed long miles along the endless highway, bound for California from Idaho. The vehicle was a fifteen footer, the biggest vehicle David had ever ridden in. After sitting half the day in the middle seat between Mom and Angela, however, the novelty had worn off, and he was carsick and bored and worried about the future.
Mom tapped the steering wheel, singing along to a Christian radio station. She wore a T-shirt and jeans. Sweat glistened on her forehead despite the air-conditioning. She’d tied her hair into an austere ponytail. She shook her head as she drove past an exit leading to a small town.
“Another dead end,” she said. “Dead and don’t know it yet.”
Mom talked a lot about the war that was coming. Eleven months earlier, terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center. The coming war would be the big one, she said, and the start of even bigger wars to come. Millions would die, heralding a dark age leading up to the end of the world.
“Who’s dead?” David said.
“Nobody, Davey.” Her mouth formed a grim smile. “Right now, they’re just sleeping. They’ll wake up soon, you can count on that. They’ll be wide awake when it all goes down.”
When she talked about the apocalypse, she sounded strangely happy.
For David’s nine-year-old brain, it was the stuff of nightmares. God loved him, and he was therefore safe, but he didn’t like the idea of God hating everyone else.
Mom had told him the next time God destroyed the world, he’d do it with fire.
She nudged him with her elbow. “You ready for it, Davey?”
He shrugged. “I guess so.”
“When Jesus comes, you have to be prepared.”
“I’m ready.” He liked this part. While God was scary, Jesus was kind. David prayed to him every night. No matter how much his parents fought, Jesus had kept him safe.
“Can I get an amen?”
David grinned. “Amen!”
“Praise God.”
Angela sighed as she gazed out the window. “I don’t see why we can’t get ready in Twin Falls, where I have friends and a life.”
“When are we going to see Dad again?” David said.
Mom’s face turned dark with alarming suddenness. “Don’t make me the bad guy for taking care of you the best way I can.”
“I was happy,” Angela said, leaving the rest unspoken. She believed Mom was taking care of herself. David had heard it all before.
Mom gripped the wheel hard enough to turn her knuckles white. “Your father’s starting a new life. It’s about time we did the same.”
This was news to David. “What new life is Dad starting?”
Mom turned up the radio and didn’t answer. In a gravelly voice, the radio preacher said the world’s sinners didn’t listen any better than Pharaoh did when Moses warned him, and for that they’d suffer, just as the Egyptians had.
Mom’s smile returned full force as she said, “Amen.”
Outside of Reno, the U-Haul pulled off the interstate. Mom drove toward a Chevron and maneuvered the truck next to the pumps. The hot, dry air reeked of gasoline fumes and desert dust.
She shoved her credit card into the slot and removed the pump handle. “They have restrooms here. Anybody who has to go, do it now, and don’t be long.”
Angela said, “Can I go in and buy a drink?”
Mom thrust her hand into the pocket of her jeans and handed over a few crumpled bills. “Nothing with caffeine. Get something for your brother too. And take the thermos and fill it up with water.”
David climbed out of the cab, happy to stretch his legs. He’d been holding his bladder in check since Winnemucca. His body broke out in sweat from the day’s scorching heat that waved above the asphalt. He followed Angela into the air-conditioned convenience store and stopped in front of the candy racks.
“You can’t have any of that,” his sister said.
“I can look.”
“I’ll buy you some peanuts.”
“Okay.” David walked off to find the restroom.
Inside, fluorescent lights glared across white tile. A man wearing a baseball cap and jeans stood shaving at the sink with the water running. The man’s eyes flickered in his reflection to gaze back at him. He winked, then went back to pulling a razor over his lathered jaw.
David put his head down and entered one of the stalls. He locked the door and raised the seat. Outside the stall, the water turned off. The bathroom became dead quiet except for the man humming while he shaved.
He couldn’t go. Peeing would make noise, which would call attention to himself. He waited for the man to either leave or turn the faucet on again, but neither happened. Pushing it out didn’t work. It was stuck.
“Niagara Falls,” he whispered.
Nothing.
He thought about what his best friend Ajay Patel might be doing back home. Ajay’s parents stayed together and didn’t fight. Nobody dragged him on a boring car ride to a whole other state to start a new life. He wondered if Ajay was one of the sinners who would be destroyed.
David wished he was Ajay.
Outside, the bathroom door cracked open. “Davey?”
Fear paralyzed him. The man could hear everything. A fierce heat blazed across David’s face and chest, leaving him miserable and nauseous. His bladder about to burst. If he stayed quiet, they’d all go away, the man and his mom both.
“Davey, answer me right now.”
“I’m peeing,” he managed.
“Come on out. I’m not asking twice.”
He zipped up and emerged weeping from the stall. The man turned toward him with a surprised expression, but the tears poured out in a flood, melting David’s vision to a hot blur.
Mom grabbed him by the hand and yanked him through the store and back into the sun.
“I have to pee,” he sobbed.
Angela chased after them. “What happened?”
Mom kept pulling. “You don’t have to go.”
“I do!”
“Then you’ll have to hold it until Sacramento.”
David wailed with fear and shame and self-pity. “I can’t! Please! I’m sorry!”
“Just let him go to the bathroom, Mom,” Angela said.
Mom stopped near the pumps and growled. “Lord, give me strength.”
She led him around the back of the gas station, where he did his business against the white cinder-block wall, moaning with relief.
When he came back, Mom was pacing out in the desert scrub, smoking a cigarette and muttering to herself. David’s shame deepened that he’d troubled her enough to smoke, something she shouldn’t do. She’d changed so much in the last year, when she and Dad started fighting all the time.
He didn’t want her to be upset. He didn’t want her to smoke. Mom had become God and Jesus rolled into one, angry and loving in equal measure. He crossed the dirt lot and said, “I’m sorry, Mom. I’ll be good.”
She quit her pacing and forced a smile. “I know you will, Davey. You’re a good boy in your heart.”
He tramped back to the truck, where Angela waited.
She handed him a bag of peanuts and a cold can of ginger ale. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
His sister glared across the lot toward their mother. “She shouldn’t get so mad. It wasn’t your fault.”
David flinched. “It was.”
“Hey. Hey, stupid.”
“I’m not answering you because I’m not stupid.”
She cupped his chin. “Next time you have a problem you can’t handle, you come to me, okay? You’re too little to take on everything.”
Before his parents’ breakup, David would have yelled back at her that he wasn’t little and that she wasn’t the boss of him. Now he accepted her comfort with a grateful nod while he chewed his peanuts into a dry paste.
David awoke in the parking lot of a Super 8 motel.
“Wait here,” Mom said and got out.
Wiping drool from his mouth, he looked around at cars and asphalt lit by the glow of pole lights. “Where are we?”
“Sacramento.” Angela sighed. “God, this really and truly sucks.”
He stretched. “I’m hungry. What time is it?”
“Just hang tight.”
“Do you think there will be kids there? Where we’re going?”
“It’ll be like going to church every day. It’s all Mom cares about now.”
“Sunday school can be fun sometimes.”
“Yippee.”
The truck door creaked open, and Mom leaned inside. “We’re checked in. Let’s eat some supper before we head up to the room.”
She led them across the street to a bright Denny’s. The host got them seated in a booth and passed out menus and crayons.
David opened his kid’s menu and started coloring the woolly mammoth from Ice Age. “Can I have the chicken tenders and fries, Mom?”
“Spaghetti for me,” Angela said. “And lemonade.”
“Oh, me too, please.”
“You got it.” Mom smiled at them. “Look at us, having an adventure.”
“Can you tell us about this place we’re going now?” Angela asked.
“It’s a community near Tehachapi. They call themselves the Family of the Living Spirit. They’re very selective about who they let in. I sent a letter to Reverend Peale, and he wrote back personally to invite us to join.”
David chewed on the word in his mind. Tehachapi. Mysterious and old. He pictured buffalo and little tendrils of smoke wisping above tepees.
“Where is this place?” Angela said.
“South east of Bakersfield. Not too far from Los Angeles. They live a pure life there, simple and close to God.”
“God kills people,” David blurted.
The smile wavered. “Not us, Davey.”
“Angela said we’ll have to go to church all the time.”
His sister kicked him under the table, but he ignored her. She did say it.
“We’re going to live off the land,” Mom said. “You can grow anything in the Cummings Valley, year round. Lettuce, tomatoes, herbs, spinach. The weather is always gorgeous. It’s a wonderful place for children to grow up.”
David wrinkled his nose. “Spinach?”
“Why is Tehachapi better than Twin Falls?” Angela said.
“The people,” Mom answered. “Everybody at the community lives in harmony with each other and God. I want to be surrounded by people who love me no matter what and won’t hurt me just because they can.”
“Sounds like the life I had back home,” his sister muttered. “Minus the part where we have to grow our own food.”
The server arrived to take their order. While Angela slouched in moody silence, Mom ordered their suppers with a bright smile. David hoped she’d forget what Angela said and remain in a good mood.
After the woman left, the smile vanished. “Your life wasn’t as great as you think it was. The world is chock-full of people who’ll try to take everything from you. They say they love you, but they only love what you can do for them.”
“You don’t know my friends. And you don’t know these people either.”
“The Reverend Peale’s community doesn’t just talk the talk,” Mom said. “They live spiritual lives in accord with God’s laws. Every day is planned out for them, they know exactly what comes next, and they want for nothing. We’ll be happy there. The wilderness will be the safest place to be when it all goes down. In any case, a little hard work in fresh air and a little less TV will do you a world of wonder, Miss Angela.”
His sister slouched even further in her seat, quietly fuming.
“Why does God want to kill everybody?” David asked.
“He doesn’t. Men will destroy the world with their greed and sin. The end will be a time of tribulation and testing.”
“He can stop it, though, right? Why doesn’t he?”
“So Jesus can return to his chosen people in all his glory.”
Put another way, if everyone was good, Jesus wouldn’t come back, though Jesus coming back was what God promised and Mom wanted.
He frowned. “Okay.”
“Don’t think too hard about it,” Mom said. “Feel its truth in your heart.”
The truth was he depended on his mother for everything, and God and Jesus made her happy. As long as they did, he’d love them too. And if he was good enough, maybe God would leave the world alone.
In the blazing heat of day, Mom pulled off the road and parked in the shade of a stand of blue oaks. She unfolded her road map and scrutinized the markings she’d made on it.
“I think we passed the turnoff,” she said.
She frowned at her children as if getting lost was their fault. The black discs of her sunglasses covered her eyes. David didn’t like when she wore sunglasses. Whenever she did, h. . .
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The Children of Red Peak
Craig DiLouie
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