“Is that the leader?” I asked.
“The Vessel of the Light,” said the woman. “If you’d like to meet him, you’re welcome to join us for dinner.”
“Thank you,” said Brooke. “That’s very kind.”
“Pull up an apple crate,” said the man. “It’s a long day until then. Have some tomatoes—fresh off the vine this morning.”
I nodded my head in thanks, still leery of the emptiness behind their eyes—or was I just imagining it?—but Brooke smiled brightly and shrugged off her backpack, sitting in the shade and accepting a tomato happily. After a moment I took off my pack as well, though I told them I preferred to stand, and watched as they went about their business with the vegetables. There were five of them at the stand: Sister Debbie and Brother Stan, the two who’d greeted us, and behind them were Sister Tracy, Sister Molly, and Brother Zeke. The names seemed strange to me—not really biblical, and not from any other religious tradition I could think of, either. They were just names, and the only benefit to getting a new one seemed to be the loss of the old one, a clean break from your former life, which tied you to this new community only in the sense that you weren’t tied to anything else anymore.
We spent the day with them, most of it talking, because the stand did very little business. I planned out how to kill each one of them if I needed to: a stab here, a slash there, the entire group gone before they could fight back. But I couldn’t just kill people. The road had some traffic, but not much, and the few customers who came seemed to be regulars—locals who knew the cultists by name and bought a bushel of carrots or potatoes without bothering to ask the price. They looked nervously at Brooke and me, perhaps wondering if they could save us from whatever indoctrination lay in store. But they didn’t do anything and drove away, and we watched the sun arc lazily across the sky, pulling us slowly toward evening.
I was not, I decided, imagining the emptiness. Sister Debbie and the others were friendly, but there was nothing behind it—no real concern for us or for anything else, just a rote recitation of meaningless small talk. Sometime in the afternoon they started over, repeating the same pleasantries, the same jokes, the same cheerful affirmations that had filled the morning, and my sense of unease grew deeper. Brooke chattered along as if nothing were out of the ordinary, and I wondered how many personalities had come and gone during the day, holding the same conversations one after the other without ever realizing it. It made me angry—it made me furious—to think that these hollow shells of former people might be the perfect match for my only friend left in the world. I closed my eyes and counted, running through number sequences and old recipes, estimating how many pots of vegetable soup I could make with the ingredients here in the stand. Anything to take my mind off of Brooke and the hell I had put her through. She didn’t deserve this—brain-dead small talk in the middle of nowhere. She deserved a house. A bed she could sleep in more than two nights in a row. An education in math and English and science, instead of just How to Wash Your Clothes in a Truck Stop Bathroom, How To Hide From The Demon Army Chasing Us. She deserved a boyfriend that loved her back. I was trying my best to give her what I could, but John Cleaver and Boy Dog are a sorry excuse for a family.
After we kill the Withered, I thought. A normal life can wait—don’t get distracted. Don’t lose track of why we’re really here. The Withered were killers, they were torturers, they were supernatural monsters; everything we’d never wanted to believe was real. Yashodh, whatever his methods, had stolen these five people’s lives so completely they didn’t even realize it—five walking corpses, physically alive but mentally gone. People who did that to other people had to be stopped. Brooke was the best possible reminder of why, and her memory, faulty as it was, was my only way to find them. I wouldn’t let them hurt anyone else like they’d hurt her.