~3~

Lost track of the days.

It could have been a week. It could have been a month. My sleep cycle was worse than it had ever been, leading to endless stretches of blank staring at the opposite wall, and to nightmares that sunk their teeth so deeply into me, Joseph needed to shake me awake when I screamed too loud. Worst of all, however, were the bouts of sleep paralysis, during which I hallucinated a multitude of horrors that made me sick just recalling them.

On top of everything, my injuries didn't feel like they were getting better. Not worse, but like they had healed as much as they were going to and there was just a constant, general ache, everywhere. I blamed it on the malnutrition and dehydration.

When I woke this morning, I felt especially uncomfortable. I stirred restlessly in my little nook, a tremble in my hands and my head light.

Joseph was already up. I stared at his feet when they appeared in the doorway, trying to remain impassive and still, unwilling to show weakness. He approached slowly and knelt, and my eyes drifted unconsciously upward to see what he held. Water in a scotch glass.

It was the most water I'd seen in days. Was this some kind of treat? It had been a while since my last dirty look. Perhaps the Father considered that 'good behaviour.'

I smelled something as the glass approached my face. Slight, sweet, and flowery, like the mildest of perfumes. And I recognized it instantly. Bliss oil.

No!

I recoiled but Joseph grabbed hold of my jaw, forcing the water between my lips. I tried to spit it out. He dropped the glass and clamped a hand over my mouth and nose. I thrashed, cuff chain clattering against the bar, trying to kick him away but he was on top of me, pinning my hip with his knee and pressing my head against the wall. His free hand stroked the side of my face, trying to soothe me.

"Shh, shh..."

Panic and rage kept me resisting even as my lungs begged for mercy. Joseph's face swam. I was drowning in Bliss. I did not want more of that poison in me if it was the elixir of life – I would not allow myself to become Joseph's bitch.

But determination rarely trumped raw instincts. I swallowed, and his hand withdrew. I inhaled. Air collided with spit and water, ragged coughs tearing my chest.

I heard him speak. Something about, "For your own good." The Father brushed his fingers along my forehead one last time and then he was gone before I could kick his balls into his bladder.

I curled up as best I could, already feeling the Bliss muddle my thoughts, dampen my pain. It wasn't enough to make me pass out, but I could still lose hours, sitting like a vegetable at the foot of the bed. It had happened a few times when wandering Henbane River. Once I accidentally drove over a barrel of Bliss. Green fumes curled like liquid nitrogen through the vents, and suddenly I realized I had stopped, nose in the ditch, with no memory of having done so; the sun had set, though I could have sworn it had been blinding me but seconds before. My companion, Luke Lee, claimed a similar experience in the seat next to me.

"Everything sounds like it's coming from the bottom of a well!" he'd exclaimed, shaking his head and rubbing his eyes.

Here, now, I half expected to hallucinate Faith skipping and twirling through a patch of flowers, laughing, beckoning me closer.

But I didn't. I saw nothing out of the ordinary. The light seemed brighter, so I closed my eyes, bracing to resist whatever reaction was heading my way.

I could understand why Dutch would have the Word of Joseph down here. But Bliss? He didn't strike me as the kind of guy to dick around with chemistry shit, like Tweak or the vet, Charles Lindsey, who'd used the cult's own weapon against it. In my poking around, when Dutch had first brought me here, I had seen no lab.

Then it hit me. I had carried Bliss around. Nasty as the stuff was, when combined with the local flora it was an excellent painkiller and it counteracted shock, keeping me alive after more than one botched firefight. I had some impressive scars now, remnants of wounds that should have put me in the ground. Too bad none of my army buddies were around to show off to.

Joseph must've found my stash when he took all my shit. But joke's on him – I didn't have nearly enough to be turned into one of Faith's mindless, hairless zombies... But he would have known that. So why...?

I couldn't feel anything anymore. No gut cramps, no phantom pain, no discomfort in my ass from sitting on concrete for hours on end, and the trembles had stopped. I stared into nothing as Joseph returned, this time with food. The crackers had a skim of honey. That must have been what made my hands stop shaking, by raising my blood sugar.

In retrospect I would remember that I had stopped shaking before eating the honey, but at the time I just enjoyed the treat, because there was little in the way of luxury even if I hadn't been a prisoner.

Joseph then whiled away the time by reading from The Canterbury Tales, which I might have read in high school. I hadn't paid attention then either. I don't know how long he sat there; seemed like days.

It took a long time for me to realize Joseph had stopped speaking. The ghost of a question hung in the air. He crawled over to me and felt my forehead. I blinked, and he vanished. Poof. Only a single lamp lit the room. I was freezing.

The blanket was in a heap nearby. I wanted it. I tried to reach for it but couldn't and didn't know why. My head was a balloon. There was an ucky feeling in my tummy but it was okay because all I had to do was get the blanket.

There were birds everywhere. Little birds with round bodies and tiny feet, hopping around on the floor. I stopped trying to get the blanket and watched them instead, smiling vacantly. My stomach clenched and white bile burped out between my lips, ran out of my nose. I kept watching the birds. They flew away when a blue heeler trotted into the room, tail sweeping side to side.

Boomer sat in front of me. He licked his lips and said, "Howdy, fucker!"

The dog burst into a cloud of moths as Joseph entered the room. Seemingly undisturbed by the strange sight, the Father tilted my head back, wiped away the puke with his own shirt, and gave me some water. Said something. Sounded worried. I wasn't worried. I was...happy...

When the convulsions started, everything else went away.

What started out as hand tremors spread to the rest of my body. I couldn't stop moving. I couldn't hold still. A throb behind my eyes intensified. The more I came down from the high the more I came to realize I was in trouble. I had not seen Joseph all day and was beginning to think he'd abandoned me to die.

Had to find help. I stood, knees knocking together like a newborn fawn. The cuffs prevented me from straightening all the way. I threw my weight backwards and the bed screeched along the floor. I fell. Got up again. Hands gripped my shoulders. Joseph. I twisted away, yanking the bed another foot from its corner.

Then I was down. I didn't know if the Father had shoved me or if the shaking made it impossible for me to remain standing. The stink of puke and piss filled my nostrils. But he was talking to me. Joseph was talking to me, calm and soothing, trying to explain something... something I couldn't comprehend...

I was staring at blue. Face down under a heavy but supple weight, lying on something soft. A bed. A bed of my own, under a heap of blankets. I could smell something unpleasant and familiar: a medicine cabinet. I was in the infirmary, staring at the privacy curtain between the two sickbeds.

Everything felt...wrong. Like I was missing something vital. I didn't crave food. I didn't need water. It was something else, something I could not get because...because...

I shivered violently, making small, pathetic mewls of distress. Sweat and drool soaked the pillow but I didn't have the strength to flip it around. A pressure on my shoulder coaxed me to lie on my back. The light was bright. I shut my eyes. Something cold touched my lip and I realized how thirsty I was. Chips of ice slipped between my teeth and softened my leathery tongue. But after a while, a knife pierced my gut and I would take no more. Without opening my eyes I rolled back onto my side, shivering with a cold I could only be imagining.

There was a bucket on the floor. No sooner had I noticed it that I tried to fill it with my insides. Up came all the water plus everything my body managed to wrangle up in time for that moment. Putrid fluid scalded my nose and back of my throat. When I thought it was over I retched again, and again and again until my stomach cramped, keeping me half curled into myself.

Someone was stroking my back. It was Pop. He always did that when I had the flu growing up. He'd just sit there and rub circles on my back until my tummy was empty.

No. No, it wasn't Pop. Pop was gone. Only the Father remained.

He was talking to me again. I heard only a few words. Bliss. Withdrawal. Be strong.

Strong. I had to be strong. That's what Deputy Pratt had said, when I was locked in Jacob Seed's compound, seconds before the Father told me of his first family: the wife, killed in the accident, and the child, the infant, who should have survived but didn't because the Father chose God over her and pinched off her life support.

Would he do that to me? Pinch a tube until I stopped kicking, because I was weak and the weak must—be—culled?

No. I was strong. I AM strong. Pratt said so. Jacob made it so. And I would prove it to Joseph!

My arm shook but I made it push me up. Behind me, the Father said something, warning me, pressing a hand against my shoulder to keep me down. I shoved it away. It came back, this time reinforced by an arm and I stood no chance. I was lying down again and he was there, right behind me, and he was so warm I didn't move. All thoughts of fight evaporated because he was warm where the blankets only represented warmth. I stopped shivering for the first time in days and consciousness ebbed away, hopefully taking my memory with it so I would never, ever recollect the feeling of a psychopath spooning me.

"Amazing grace, so sweet the sound..."

Joseph would tell me later that I slept for five days.

Five whole fucking days. While I wasn't missing much, when you spend a good portion of your life in someone's crosshairs, taking away five days not spent trying to survive was theft. On the other hand, five days wasn't a lot out of the seven year sand glass.

I was faint, but the shaking of my arm when I pushed myself up was not of Bliss deprivation. It would seem I was out of those woods. Joseph had mentioned withdrawal, and it made sense now that I wasn't delirious or semi-conscious: Hope County had been a giant bong. Food, water, and air all poisoned by that damn white flower. But down here, in Dutch's bunker, the water and air were filtered, the food grown by the Resistance or bought from outside of the county. I had gone cold turkey without realizing.

Or had I? I never once saw Joseph pour the water he gave me. For all I knew, he'd been spiking it ever since Day One, giving me less and less with every shot glass. But then what about him? Why didn't he collapse and pass out and become as helpless as an infant?

When I felt like I could, I pushed myself to my feet. I wasn't wearing pants or a shirt, but I could see fresh clothes on the examination bench to my right. I looked down at myself. The body I worked so hard to build and keep healthy was already shrivelling. It was covered in scars, some old, some not fully healed. I pressed the star-shaped puckers on my thighs. Those fuckers still hurt.

There was no such thing as a perfect piñata. I had always been proud of my battle scars. Proof to myself that I had what it took to charge through the fires of hell and withstand the consequences. But now...

I traced the word WRATH inked crudely across my chest. This was not something to be proud of. True, I had rushed to save my friends in Fall's End rather than flee the region, but I walked right into John's trap even though I saw it coming. Because I'd been consumed by rage.

I got that from Pop. Ma had been the gentle, bible loving one who always told me to never allow anger to control my actions. But after she was gone, Pop would tell me, When anger rolls into town, shit gets done. I never truly understood what he meant by that until I picked up a gun for the first time and was kicked to the other side of the planet.

My feet were bare and cold, tapping over concrete as I stumbled to the examination bench, where I pulled on the fresh clothes and then made for the door. It might as well be at the top of Mount Everest. My hands splayed against it when I finally got there, leaving hand-shaped smudges of condensation on the cold metal. The door didn't budge. I tried to pull it. Still didn't budge. Without the energy to have an opinion on my new prison, I staggered back to the bed and lied down, staring at the ceiling.

I wondered how much of the past few weeks had been real. I knew I'd been tripping hell's bells during my many adventures through Henbane River, including the final confrontation with Faith. I'd thought I was fighting an epic battle against a Bliss-flinging witch and her army of farmer Angels, but learned later of a report that came in about a man spinning around in circles, shooting wildly, and ducking and weaving around invisible attacks until he accidentally shot a girl hiding in the trees. Turns out that had been me.

I did feel bad about that still. Faith, or Rachel or whatever, had just been another victim of drugs and alpha male, fatherly-figure manipulation. However, the way she looked and spoke to me, to everyone... It wasn't condescending or supercilious. She had just pretended to be confused as to why I didn't need Joseph's guidance. Why I didn't understand. It pissed me off.

The Bliss had made me want to understand. To give up my own will and just be happy and safe. But always, a voice that sounded like Sheriff Whitehorse's had come through and snapped me out of it. With a little help from a syringe of adrenaline.

Hm. Adrenaline. Though not a cure, it had definitely brought me back to earth after a particularly potent dose of Bliss vape. No doubt there was something out there that better combated the effects of the drug, and Joseph knew what it was. Bliss came from nature, and therefore could be neutralized by nature. Not that a knuckle-dragger like me could ever discover what that was, even if I had the means of finding it right in front of me. No doubt whatisname, Feeney, the Walter White of Hope County, had discovered something, but I had never bothered to scour the Jessop Conservatory hard enough. And because I shot him out of a helicopter, no one had a chance to question him.

Whatever the antidote was, Joseph had it, and that was why he never rode the coaster of withdrawal like I did.

Fucker could have shared. Could have saved me from suffering. He probably figured it was "God's will." If I lived, I lived. If not, well, it wasn't like I was making good company anyway.

Joseph came in later to pray with me. Or rather, to pray while gripping my wrist so tightly my hand went numb as I stared resolutely at the ceiling. I didn't know why he just wouldn't get it. You couldn't force someone to believe something they didn't. I couldn't pray to his deity any more than I could Hurk Jr.'s monkey god king. It would be like talking on the phone without anyone on the other end of the line.

When Joseph raised his head, he was smiling, tears glistening in his eyes, like a proud parent. I stared back, bewildered.

"You have completed a trial. God has deemed you worthy to stand by my side. You, not my brothers, my sister. I thought I knew His plan. But now I see. You were always meant to be here." He raised his gaze up, closing his eyes, face light. "The faithful and the heathen, the devoted and the unfulfilled. I am the kite, and you are the string. I fly, but you keep me anchored so as to remember why I am here. And without me, you would remain on the ground, oblivious, unenlightened." The grey eyes fell on me again, and he smiled. "I am proud of you."

I just stared as he stood, pressed his lips to my forehead, and left the room. I wasn't sure if I was more annoyed or creeped out, but resolved to feed him his teeth the next time he tried to kiss any part of my body again.

"'Round and 'round I go, addicted to the numb, livin' in the cold. The higher, the lower, the down, down, down. Sick of being tired and sick and ready for another kind of fix. The damage is damning me down, down, down. My heart's beating faster, I know what I'm after. I've been standing here my whole life. Everything I've seen twice, now it's time I realize it's spinning back around now. On this road I'm crawling, save me 'cause I'm falling, now I can't seem to breathe right."

Runnin', Adam Lambert