The younger one points to the water bottle that I left sitting beside the spot where I’d spent the night. Shit. Shit. Shit.
The three of them turn simultaneously. Our eyes meet.
“Well,” says the younger one. “Hi.”
“Hi,” I say.
“You a journalist?” the older one asks.
“Not exactly,” I say.
“What are you doing out here then?” he asks.
“It’s kind of a long story,” I stand from my crouch, my knees cracking.
“You sure you’re not a journalist?” the oldest one asks. “Because we could use a journalist.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“We haven’t been exactly getting the best press, you know?” the younger one says. “Ollie,” he sticks his hand out.
I shake it.
“Jeff,” he gestures toward the middle-aged man. “Sid,” he points to the oldest of the three.
“Ione,” I say.
“Maybe we could talk to you, tell our side of the story,” Ollie says.
“Ollie,” Jeff cautions.
“What? It’s the best chance we’ve got at this point to turn this thing around.”
“I would be happy to do that,” I say. “I went to school for journalism. I’ve published a few pieces.” Suddenly I’m giving these men my resume, seeing my ticket in.
“You wanna come back with us?” Ollie asks.
“Ollie—” Jeff begins.
“Yes,” I say the word before I can think through the ramifications. I’m entering an active crime scene. Someone is dead and the FBI is putting pressure on these people to come out. And now, I’m putting myself in the middle of it.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” the other man says to Ollie. He eyes me suspiciously.
Ollie looks at me again, like he’s sizing me up, assessing the level of threat that I pose. He apparently finds it acceptable.
“We need her help,” he says.
“I don’t think Tom will like this,” the second oldest man says.
Hearing Tom’s name is enough to bring reality crashing back down around me. The fact that this is really about to happen washes over me. It suddenly feels like everything is happening far too quickly.
“I don’t like it,” says the one with the walking stick.
Ollie sighs. The other two argue for a few moments, going back and forth about the pros and cons of bringing me back with them. Finally, Ollie interrupts them.
“This is the best chance we’ve got,” he repeats his statement from earlier. “We need to take her back with us.”
The other two look me over, doing their own threat assessment. They look back at each other, and finally, the three of them come to an unspoken agreement.
They lead me down the side of the hill. I follow them, trying to catch up as even the older man makes good time with his walking stick. Ollie hangs back to talk to me.
“You think you can put a positive spin on this?” he asks.
“I can try,” I say, not sure that if I were to write something about what’s going on if it would be possible to make Tom appear to be the victim. I’m also not sure that I would want to paint him any other way than as the villain.
“We can use the help,” Ollie says. “So, what made you come out here?”
We walk through another little copse of trees just like the two that I passed through on my trek into and out of the creek.
“Curiosity, I guess,” I say. “I guess I wanted to get back into journalism,” I lie.
“Well, this is a hell of a story, I’d say.”
Ollie seems to have more of a grasp on reality than I would have given him credit for at first. I’d imagined the people who came out here to live on Tom’s compound as empty-headed or crazy. I imagined the weak being preyed upon. And maybe these people were weak when Tom found them. I had no doubt that he was a predator at the core of his being. But these people weren’t caricatures of cult followers; they were real human beings with wants and needs just like the rest of us. They just got swept up in something bigger than themselves.
And it just so happened that my former professor was at the heart of it.
“I’d say you’re right,” I respond.
The four of us walk across a pasture with cattle in it.
“These yours?” I ask.
“Yep,” Ollie says. “We’ve got cattle, horses, pigs. We only eat two of them, though,” he smiles at me. He’s charming even if he is a kid. I imagine him to be about twenty-three at most. His life is just beginning, I want to tell him. He doesn’t need whatever Tom has made him think he does.
“So,” I broach the subject. “What’s this I heard about a pregnant woman being shot?”
His face darkens. His brows knit themselves together with an invisible stitch.
“You heard right,” he says. “Birdie. She got shot that night. She probably needs a doctor. Maybe you could help with that,” he looks imploringly at me.
It’s clear that he feels for her. That he doesn’t want her to die out here. Whatever convictions he has about Tom as a leader, he has his doubts here. It’s a point I might need to exploit later, and I make a note of it.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I say. Hearing her name hits me in the gut. Imagining how far we’ve fallen or come, however you look at it, is overwhelming. It’s then that I make out the ranch in the distance.
“Here we are,” Ollie says. “Home sweet home.” He says the last bitterly. I wonder how much he believed it when he first came here—if he thought in a million years it would end this way. Because this is the way it ends. Anyone on the outside can see that.
As I take it in, I’m swept up in memory. Stepping under a barbed wire fence onto the proper part
