Through A Glass, Darkly (The Assassins of Youth MC #1)(3)
Naturally, the guy on the intercom didn’t like that one bit. “Who the f*ck was that?” The religious zealot got all sweary. “Who’s that f*cking * who just blazed through the gate?”
“Sorry about that, sorry!” I was frantic in my apologies. “That’s my associate. I swear to God I didn’t know he was back there! Can I come in now?”
The gate started to close. The guy was saying, “Now this wasn’t part of the deal you made with Allred—” but I was already inside the compound.
The weird, freaky, bizarre as-seen-on-TV compound.
The place that would change my life irreversibly.
Riding slower now, I gave up all hope of finding Breakiron. I figured someone would pop out to stop me, so I just tooled along. About a mile from the gate the buildings started. Strange, Cape Cod-style saltboxes, the main difference being these things sprawled like barracks, room after room added on past the front door. A couple of Humvees patrolled the streets like there was a curfew in place, but no one stopped me. There were businesses that any citizen would need, like a plumber, hairdresser, and bookstore. Only, I had the feeling the bookstore only sold one genre, and the hairdresser only did one style.
A few ordinary vehicles drove sedately around, and I passed a temple, a sign for what looked like a coal mine, and a school. This was where I started seeing the women in prairie garb and sun bonnets. The plain ankle-length dresses with puffy sleeves gave the women the look of old-timey prison inmates. The women without bonnets displayed, contrary to all expectations, elaborate hairdos. Waist-length hair was rolled, coiled, and beaten into submission like penitent crowns.
The tide was turning, and it would take a life jacket and ten horses to pull me back now.
CHAPTER TWO
MAHALIA
I didn’t want to be born.
Our Prophet teaches that we pre-exist, that we are old souls waiting to be born into new bodies. We eat, drink, and wear energy that used to be pure matter, perfect brilliance and flame. We wait for the perfect challenging life to be reborn into, the most heart-rending of existences, and give it meaning.
That’s true for most of us. I, however, was an accident. I don’t know how I slipped on by God’s watchful eye to be sent down into this horror. Like everyone, I once belonged to something greater. Pre-existence was a heavenly womb where we were all cradled in the safe, secure arms of God. For most people, mortality is an ascension, not a fall, like it was with me. Supposedly, we take limitless potential into a world of sin and tragedy. Me? I just fell here, crashed like some clumsy loser, destined to be stubborn, unwilling to take the winning ticket of God’s plan.
Supposedly, no one will be left out. Life isn’t a lottery where only a lucky few will continue into the blissful afterlife, surrounded by the loving people we know now. We should try to imitate God, brimming with love and devotion. But to try to actually be God is the most heinous sin of all.
My lot was to be thrown in with Allred Lee Chiles, Prophet of the Cornucopia Clan, pretender to the throne. In my distant pre-memory, I belonged to a world before language where I was at one with everything. This forgotten memory is imprinted in my being at a cellular level. I don’t need a god to explain the beauty of Canadian honkers flying in formation, or the awe-inducing artistry in the luminous halos of Alaska’s northern lights. Why do I need faith in things eternal? I recall the bliss of floating in spiritual arms, the paradise where I lived before I was wrenched forth and brought down here. Yes, most call birth an ascension. I term it the worst fall imaginable.
My haven turned to hell when I was ordered to be sealed to Allred Lee Chiles five years ago. I was a miserable wretch, a zombified servant to people I despised, long before Gideon Fortunati walked in those doors.
Gideon Fortunati. What an omen of a name. I first heard Allred blathering his beautiful name when I served him coffee and red velvet cake in his office. Yes, we can drink caffeine, and liquor too. Fundamentalists split from the mainstream Latter Day Saints before those Saints enforced strict health codes. Alcohol probably hasn’t helped reign in some of the more “whacked” ideas Allred came up with, either. He sure did love his scotch whiskey. Booze and smoking were allowed, but food and gluttony were still numbing to one’s spirit.
“Mr. Fortunati…blah blah blah…Mr. Fortunati…blah blah blah,” was basically all I heard because I had developed a habit of not “eavesdropping” on his conversations. I used to listen to everything that went on, thinking that somehow it would assist me some day in my escape. But as the years went on and my sentence appeared eternal—and I was chastised over and over by Allred for listening to his business—it all became a dull drone. I figured it gave me time for my own thoughts this way. My own thoughts were sometimes of a forbidden nature. It was just something in my character, a base, hormonal inclination of my senses that could be as easily stopped as a tidal wave.
As we used to say in the outside world. A woman can dream, can’t she?
But that day, the name of Gideon Fortunati rang in the stale air. Allred and the Stake President, Parley Pipkin, were both smoking cigars. The open window that let onto the schoolyard didn’t dispel all of the smoke. I hated being in there, but suddenly I was intent on setting their paper doilies exactly so on their side tables, in making sure the fans cleared the air but didn’t muss their hair.