the way a fish bone catches in your throat. The bullets had entered from the front of their car.
“Now that’s disgusting,” Brother Stephen teased, but his tone was still triumphant. “That’s some wild shooting, Sister Colleen. This is the most famous scene out of the whole thing. It’s on the television news, in the newspapers, on the Internet, everywhere. Not these photos, exactly, because the bodies aren’t in them, but those car seats. Man, you’ve got them pissing in their shoes.”
Footsteps approached the door to the anteroom, and Brother Stephen struck like a snake to snatch the papers from Colleen and stuff them down the front of his trousers.
Brother Michael entered. He scowled. “What are you two doing?”
“Nothing, sir,” Brother Stephen said, a little too quickly, Colleen thought.
Brother Michael’s gaze shifted. “Sister Colleen, do you have something you want to tell me?”
Colleen fought the sudden, inexplicable urge to vomit. “No, Brother Michael,” she said.
His scowl deepened. He had an uncanny way of reading people. “You don’t look well, Sister Colleen.”
“No, sir, I’m fine. Thank you, sir.”
He looked back toward Brother Stephen, and then again at Colleen. “A boy and a girl alone in a room on the day they are recognized for valor,” he mused aloud. “Forgive me if my suspicious mind gets the better of me. Need I remind you of your celibacy vows?”
Colleen blushed, while Brother Stephen looked as if he’d been slapped. Then they both laughed. It felt good to laugh.
“No, sir,” Colleen said. “Not a problem.”
“I remember my vows well, Brother Michael,” Brother Stephen agreed. “No need to worry about that.”
Brother Michael folded his arms and scowled even more deeply. “Well, if not that, then what?”
Colleen caught herself shooting a glance to Brother Stephen, but when she broke it off, Brother Michael had already seen it.
“Interesting dilemma,” Brother Michael thought aloud. “If I press you for an answer, you’ll likely feel obliged to lie. Lying is a sin, of course, and if I put you in that position, then I will be partly responsible for your eternal torment in Hell.” He paused for dramatic effect. “How could I ever live with the guilt?” He winked at Brother Stephen and made a shooing motion with both his hands. “Carry on. Both of you get out of here.”
They donned their coats, and as they opened the door onto the bright sunshine, Brother Stephen patted her on the bottom. She whirled on him, but then he pushed past and headed off to join Brother Zebediah and the other boys he hung around with.
Outside, as the frigid air embraced her, Colleen felt herself trembling. A chill had invaded her, and it was not just from the twenty-degree air. It was as if the warmth that flowed through her veins during the rolling applause had turned to something frozen and ugly. Make no mistake: Brother Michael had just authorized carnal relations between her and Brother Stephen. That was the wink; and once authorized, they could not be denied. Certainly, not by her. She was nineteen now, after all, and she believed that Brother Stephen was twenty-both of them old enough to do their part to populate the Army for the future. And as the offspring of two such heroes, her children would be born into fame. They would be raised with the others in the communal dormitories, but the expectations upon them would be enormous.
Colleen should have felt honored to be coupled with Brother Stephen, but even as a small child, he had been cruel and violent. He preyed on other children under the guise of character-building competition, and the guardians had never interfered.
It had always seemed wrong to her, and while she would never say such a thing aloud lest she invite a flogging, the mother in her could not be denied. Children sometimes just needed to be held, especially when they were small, but after they turned two and they became part of the communal dormitory, such displays of affection were forbidden. To pamper was to encourage weakness, and given the mission at hand, weakness in any form could not be tolerated.
Still, when the younger children became overwhelmed by their schooling and their training, they knew that they could turn to her, and that she would be there for them, not to encourage weakness, but to help them find the pathway to strength when their resolve was sometimes shaken.
Marriage did not exist within the Army because marriage implied ownership of relations. Women between the ages of twenty and thirty were expected to bear children, per the designs of Brother Michael and the Elders, and once weaned, the children became the communal property of everyone. She would lie with Brother Stephen at a time of his choosing, and she would accept his seed, but she prayed that he would at least be gentle.
As Colleen wandered across campus among her fellow soldiers, she became aware that something had changed. She was a killer of innocent children whose crimes consisted of being born to parents who drove along the wrong bridge at the wrong moment of the wrong day. The images of the ravaged little boy and girl flooded her mind, bringing a rush of emotion. She gagged. That frigid block of ice that had formed in her gut seized and doubled in size.
She knew what was coming, and she didn’t think she could stop it. Desperate for some measure of privacy, Colleen dashed twenty yards to a small copse of pine trees, where she vomited into winter-dead scrub growth that was clustered at its base. Thankful for the cover provided by the thick pines, she sat heavily on the frigid mulch and gave in to the sobs that wracked her body.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“I still don’t understand why they did this to you,” Christyne said as she fussed yet again at the cut in Ryan’s left eyebrow. Upon returning to their sweltering cell, she had had the presence of mind to dangle two of the water bottles out of one of the ventilation windows, suspended by Ryan’s shoelaces. Now that one was nearly frozen, she pressed it against his eye.
He yelped and pushed her hand away. “That hurts, Mom.”
She persisted, swinging the bottle in the air to avoid his grasp. “You need this to bring the swelling down.”
He might be nearly blind from the swelling, but he could still do good interference. “Give it to me, then. I’ll do it.”
His mom surrendered the block of ice, and he held it against the side of his face, near the cut, but not directly on top of it the way she had done. At least the bleeding had stopped.
“You must have done something to anger them before they did this to you,” Christyne pressed. He was pissed that she didn’t believe his version of what had happened.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said again. “Five minutes after they took me out of here, we were upstairs, and one of the guards just hit me. I hadn’t said anything. My hands were tied, for God’s sake.”
Christyne shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense. You must have done something.”
That was it. “I did nothing!” Ryan roared, his voice echoing off the walls. “I didn’t do a damn thing! They just hit me.”
He saw his mom recoil from his words, and he liked that, even though yelling made everything hurt worse. He thought they might have cracked a rib on his left side.
“We have to figure out how to get out of here,” he said. “At least I do. Those guys want to kill me.”
“There is no way out of here,” Christyne said, “so don’t even talk about it.” She started straightening up the cell. Cleaning was her body language for shutting down discussion.
Ryan pulled the ice away from his eye. “Whose side are you on? We have to talk about it.”
She stopped her work and pointed at him with her forefinger. “Stop,” she said. “Right now. Just stop.”
“Stop what?”
“You’ve got that Indiana Jones look in your eye. I want you to stop planning whatever dangerous adventure you’ve got swimming around that imagination of yours.”
He scowled and cocked his head. “You know I’m talking about getting out of here, right?”
Mom went to work fluffing a pillow. “I know exactly what you’re talking about. It’s foolish and you’re going to get yourself hurt.”
“ Foolish? You heard what they said up there, right? The part about how they’re going to kill us in a
