“…you standing here are the chosen ones. You are pure because you answered the call and joined right away. Only you, therefore, are clean and pure. The others must be cleansed and purified. God has spoken to me. I know my destiny and act as his obedient servant. The time of the cleansing is upon us,” he shouts across the crowd raising his arms. Lying on the grating of the catwalk, Greg and I look at each other with raised eyebrows.
“You only need to look at the others who run in the night to know this for truth. They fear the light of the day and God’s wrath. They have been cursed and their uncleanliness shown. The world was long coming to this moment and it’s up to us to keep the faith and clean the world of its impurities. God has set each of us here for this task. I will lead you to the true heaven on earth,” he continues. There is general cheering from the crowd.
“I count twenty-eight in the crowd, ten behind the man, and three around the man in front plus him,” Greg whispers.
“That’s what I have,” I respond. “And not one is female.”
“But, brothers, we also have unclean ones who walk in the day. They are no less cursed than the ones who roam the night. God called you here at the beginning so we can tell the clean from the cursed. Do you repent and seek to be purified?” The orating man shouts and points a finger at the one being held in front of him.
The man doesn’t answer but continues to hold his head down. The man on the podium nods to the one in front of the held man. I hear the sound of his fist connecting with a cheek from up here. The held man’s head rocks and he slumps even further
“You will be purified regardless but to truly be clean, you must submit,” the man on the boxes says but this time without shouting.
There is movement to the side of the group and a woman is brought forward held between two other men. Seeing the bloodied man, she wails. She begins to thrash trying to shake off the hands holding her but it does no good.
“To submit and be clean, you must willingly turn your wife over to us,” the speaker says pointing to the woman being held.
The man raises his head for the first time. New and old blood mingles on his face from his nose and mouth. One eye is nearly shut. He looks out to the crowd and then over to his wife, angling his head to see through his good eye. The woman screams again.
“Never,” the man says. The word coming out of the man’s bloodied and swollen mouth is slurred but very clear.
“We’ll take her anyway but this is for your own soul. Submit and be cleansed,” the speaking man shouts. The others in the crowd are watching this unfold with an eager intensity. Any worried feelings I had about taking the others down quickly vanish.
“Chris. Do it. Pleeeeeease,” the woman implores. The man shakes his head and looks back to the ground at his feet.
The speaking man nods again and the bloodied man’s shirt is cut from his back. Reaching beside the boxes, the one who belted him before retrieves a whip.
“This is all kinds of fucked up,” Greg states.
“Yeah, you have that right,” I reply watching the scene below.
My mind is furiously working on scenarios to take care of things before they get uglier but I have yet to come up with something that will be effective. There are over forty armed men below us and two of us. If the men were separated or we could get at them in smaller groups, then there are a hundred things we could do. Greg and I have two grenades apiece and four grenades would pretty much clear the room seeing they are gathered but that would also mean the man and woman would be taken out so the point becomes rather moot.
“That man deserves to be saved,” Greg says. “As does the woman.”
“I know,” I reply.
“What’s the plan? What are we going to do?” Greg asks.
“Nothing,” I reply with a sigh.
I hate saying those words. A feeling of hopelessness sinks inside me knowing there isn’t much we can do right now. But that doesn’t mean we won’t be doing anything. My jaw clenches and I feel my teeth grind. I would like nothing more right now than to wrap my hands around the jerk spilling hot air from the boxes. Make it slow.
“We’re just going to let this happen?” Greg asks incredulously.
I look Greg directly in the eye. “Yes, we are. I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit but that’s what we’re going to do. If we do something now we’ll either take out those two in the process or we’ll go down which won’t help anyone.”
Greg holds my eye for a moment. I sense a deep anger within him that matches my own. He releases the air held in his lungs with a deep sigh. “You’re right. I’ve been wracking my brains and can’t come up with anything that doesn’t include going Rambo and those two not making it through. But those fuckers are going to pay.”
“That they are and we’re carrying their bill,” I reply.
Greg is not someone I would not want to mess with. With his large, muscular frame, he looks like he could rip your arms out of their sockets without much effort. His dark eyes, mimicking his dark skin, narrow and he nods before turning back to the room below.
The snap of a whip and the man’s scream echoes for what seems an eternity. Just below the threshold of the man’s scream comes the woman’s. She is begging the man to stop. Which man she is yelling at is left to guess. She’s just screaming, “Stop. Please stop.” It makes me sick inside but I feel a cold determination settle. The man’s scream falls silent.
“I’ll submit. I submit. Just please stop,” the woman cries out through her tears.
“You’ll submit alright,” the speaking man says with a smirk. I hear a few chuckles from the larger group. The men behind the one speaking eye the crowd with narrowed eyes. They must be his bodyguards or something. They appear to be looking for any dissension within the crowd.
The whip flies through the air again and snaps against the man’s back. There is no resulting scream this time except from the woman. The man’s legs give out and his body slumps further. The two holding him are now supporting his entire weight. They lower him to the floor with the woman wailing non-stop. She thrashes against those holding her wanting to reach her husband.
“Take him back to his room. You may share the woman,” the preacher says stepping off the boxes and walks across the room to a door to our left.
The entourage of ten men follows in his wake. Two men pick up the man lying on the floor and drag him in the opposite direction. They carry him through a door at the far end. The woman is dragged screaming and thrashing through the side doors the preacher exited. The crowd breaks up and heads into those same doors. The room empties and falls silent. The only evidence that anything took place is small patches of red on the waxed wooden floor where the man was held.
“Again, I say that was majorly fucked up. This place is all kinds of fucked up,” Greg whispers through clenched teeth.
“Agreed. Let’s go get those people out of here,” I say.
“What are you thinking?” Greg asks as we continue lying on the grating looking out over the now empty room.
“Well, they dragged that poor soul through those doors taking him back to his room,” I say nodding at the doors to the right. “The others left through the ones on the left so I’m guessing they keep their rooms separate from the prisoners.”
“Yeah, I noticed that as well. That is with the exception of that woman,” Greg comments.
“So we get those we can to a safe place and see,” I say.
The two men who dragged the either dead or unconscious man emerge from the doors and cross the room. They are casually carrying their carbines and their murmured conversation drifts upward from the room. They disappear through the left hand doors.
“Shall we,” I say after they leave the room below in silence once again.
“Lead on,” Greg replies.
We crawl backward, close the door, and don our goggles. Stepping over the body once again on our way down the stairs, we emerge into the hall. At the double steel doors leading into the humongous room, the hallway branches left and right. We silently step to the corner and peer around. Another security door sits twenty feet down
