The Fierce Reads Anthology(29)

“You’ve had the belt before,” his father said. “It seems not to have made an impression on you. A day or two in the cellar should remedy that.”

“No!” Olivia cried. She knew better than anyone how terrified Rance was of the dark. She understood, and did not judge him. “Prophet, I must confess. I brought Rance to the field. I tempted him. Punish me instead. Rance is good, and I…I am a wicked girl. I should be taught a lesson.”

The prophet considered, frowning. And then he released Rance’s neck and shoved him away. But he kept hold of Olivia’s hair, and a smile bent his lips.



To Rance, it seemed as though he were the only one who could hear Olivia through the floorboards as the white-clad Followers sang their evening hymns. On the Church of Light’s compound, worship services were held three times a day. First at sunrise. Then again at noon. And again at the close of day.

Olivia had been locked in the cellar for five hours, and she was still screaming to be let out. Rance wanted more than anything to go to her, to rescue her from the darkness his father had sentenced her to for three days and three nights without food or water. But if he openly defied the prophet he would end up in the dark himself.

We could run away, Rance thought. I could rescue Olivia and together we could leave this place.

But where would they go? How would two thirteen-year-olds survive in a world neither of them had ever been part of? And how long would it be before Ram Ridley sent a team of Followers to drag the two of them back to the compound?

No, Rance could not save the girl he loved. All he could do was sit with his people and sing loudly enough that he couldn’t hear her cries.

But when the song ended and there was a moment of silence before the prophet began his evening sermon, Rance heard what Olivia said.

“Rance, pleeeease! Make them let me out! I’m scared!”

A few eyes flitted toward him, and Rance felt his cheeks go red with shame. He was the prophet’s son. He was supposed to set an example for the conduct of others, but instead he had let himself be tempted by a girl. No, a woman now. Olivia was thirteen. She had breasts, and she had told him herself that she’d begun to bleed. She was now capable of bearing children. If things had gone too far in the field, Rance might have been the one to get her with child. A kiss before marriage was an affront to God, but a child born out of wedlock…no matter how much he repented, Rance would never be washed clean of that sin. It was too great.

Rance had thought that Olivia was lying to protect him when she told the prophet she had purposely tempted Rance. But perhaps she was telling the truth. Suppose she’d intended to exploit the weakness all men felt in the presence of women.

“My dearest Followers,” the prophet boomed out in the chapel. He stood behind the podium and grasped the edges with his hands as though to keep himself from falling over. His face was pale, but his eyes were bright and reflective, like pond water when the moon shines off it. “I have had a revelation,” the prophet told them. “The end is nigh. I have seen it, a storm the likes of which has not been seen since the days of Noah and the flood. But from this storm there will be no ark to carry us away. This shall be a storm of judgment.” The prophet’s eyes, burning now, found his son. “Only those who are without sin shall be saved.”

The storm, his father said, would arrive in three days.



On the third evening, the Followers gathered in the Church of Light, and, as Prophet Ram Ridley had predicted, the rains came.

But Rance was not impressed with God’s cleansing storm. It started as a light sprinkle of drops, more like a mist than actual rain. But the mist soon became a downpour. Still, it was only rain. Just a summer storm, the kind that usually ended before it began.

But it didn’t end.

As water drummed on the roof, the Followers sang their songs. They prayed. Prophet Ridley sermonized and whipped his people into a frenzy, and then they sang some more. Rance could not keep his eyes from the windows. He kept waiting for the rain to stop, but it went on and on.

While lightning split the sky in a hundred places and thunder pounded their eardrums, the Followers around him stomped and threw their hands in the air and praised God. They basked in His glory, but Rance could not think about God. All he could think about was Olivia in the cellar, cold and alone in the terrible darkness. Shivering and wet and—

Wet.

Rance thought back to the last time there’d been a hard rain. The cellar had flooded. And that storm had been nothing compared to what they were experiencing now.

Olivia.

Rance ran from the chapel and burst out into the pouring rain. Droplets smacked his cheeks like pellets and burst apart. He was instantly soaked from head to foot. He heard his father shouting for him to get back inside, but for once he ignored the prophet. He slammed the church doors shut and rammed the only thing he could find, a piece of broken two-by-four, through the handles.

It wouldn’t keep his father and the Followers inside long, but it gave him time.

Rance sprinted around to the side of the church where the cellar door was located. But he should have paused to think before rushing out into the rain. The cellar was padlocked.

Rance pounded on the wooden doors. “Olivia! Can you hear me! Please answer!”

No sound. And no time to wait for it.

Rance had to break through the door before his father and the Followers stopped him. Before Olivia drowned in the cellar. Before the buried dead were washed loose from their graves, and Olivia floated with them. In the dark. In the dark, where he must go to save her.