Creed Read online

“When?” I pressed my face to the glass, wondering when this town had gone from completely abandoned to fully operational. “When did all of this happen? When did they all come back out?”

  “About ten minutes after I brought you in.”

  Joseph must’ve seen the confused look cross my face, because he eased me down onto the bed and waited for my breathing to slow before he continued. “The alarms that were going off when you came into town—I pulled them.”

  I nodded. He’d already told me that.

  “They’re our way of alerting people of an emergency. No different from what other small towns have, I suppose.”

  “Um hmm,” I mumbled, not bothering to tell him that normal people, people who took advantage of things like phones and TVs, had something called the emergency broadcast system and Weather Bug, but whatever.

  “We have one police officer and a volunteer fire department. They all live here. They were all born and raised here. We use the sirens to alert them when they’re needed. Works if there’s a bad storm coming or if my father needs to gather his people.”

  “Can they hear it in the neighboring towns?” I asked, hoping that somebody with no blood ties to Purity Springs would get curious and come looking.

  “No, but it doesn’t matter. If my father needs them, his brothers will come.”

  “And?” I said, waving my hands to hurry him along.

  “When the sirens go off, everyone gathers in the chapel. It didn’t take my father long to figure out I was missing and that I pulled the alarm. He held everybody there until he could figure out what I was up to.”

  “The car,” I muttered.

  “Yeah, that’s when he found your car. But once he decided the town was safe, after I brought you in, things went back to normal.”

  “And they believe him,” I said, gesturing toward the window. “They actually believe the crap he feeds them?”

  “Yes.”

  It was one word. Complete and absolute. Brooking no challenge.

  I thought of this town, of the one hundred and forty-eight residents worshiping Elijah, and I groaned. “Oh my God. Here I was thinking all along that the only person we needed to beat was your dad. But there’s a whole town out there. Every single one of them thinks I belong to them, that I was born and raised for them!”

  “And two towns beyond that,” he added, reminding me how far his father’s hold extended. “It’s possible, though. I don’t know exactly how yet, but it’s possible to get out of here. It’s happened before, and it can happen again.”

  Twenty

  His words caught my attention, and I looked up. “Who? When?”

  That fact that somebody had managed to escape Elijah Hawkins’s hold was exactly what I needed to hear. Then it hit me. “Mary.”

  Joseph grinned, one of the first genuine smiles I’d seen from him. “Yes, my Aunt Mary. My mother’s sister.”

  “Where is she now? How did she do it?”

  “I don’t know exactly. My mother never talked about it, and it wasn’t my place to ask. But I think something happened, something involving my father.”

  I didn’t bother to press for details. I’d spent less than an hour with Elijah Hawkins and that was plenty enough time for my mind to fill in the blanks. And none of those blanks were good.

  “She got up in the middle of the night and took off. She knew my uncles controlled the surrounding towns. Everybody does. She drove over three hundred miles until she finally stopped and told the police about Purity Springs, about my father … ”

  “And?” I prompted. I didn’t have time for him to get lost in thought. I wanted information. I wanted to know the exact route his aunt had taken, how she’d managed to slip away undetected, and whether Elijah had ever caught up with her.

  “The police took her statement, and they did come looking. She brought two officers back with her, along with a woman who claimed to work for the some social services agency. They were here for two days. They questioned nearly everyone, including my mother, but found nothing.”

  “How is that possible?” I asked, remembering the books we’d found. They were like ledgers, cataloging what punishments were doled out and when. You couldn’t get better proof than that.

  “Think about it, Dee. Does my dad look strange to you? Does Purity Springs look at all off?”

  I considered his question for half a second, then realized he was right. Sure, the houses were a little outdated, and the town had a weird vibe to it, but they drank milk with dinner. They sold Pringles at the gas station. They had streetlights and a bank. To the outside world, yeah … they looked normal.

  “What about the books and shed with all the claw marks? That room you were—” I stopped as the words caught in my throat and the memories came rushing back. The plinking sound. The blood dripping from my arms into the small silver bowl. “The room you bled me in.”

  “The isolation room can easily pass as an irrigation shed. Every farming community has one. And that room … well, that’s part of an unfinished basement. The floor is tiled for obvious reasons, but to anyone else, it looks like nothing more than a cellar.”

  “But what about the kids? I saw the books, Joseph. I know what their parents do to them.”

  “Punishment is a form of guidance. Of love. The adults don’t see it as wrong. As for the kids, well, two things. They fear my father’s retribution, and that fear keeps them from telling the truth. Plus, my father isn’t stupid; he always takes the mental route first. He only resorts to physical violence when he can’t get through to them any other way. And trust me, sometimes you’d rather be hit than deal with the stuff he can unload on you.”

  Joseph stopped speaking and refocused his gaze on the window, then back at me. “That and the fact that the worst of it was always reserved for me.”

  “What happened to your aunt?” I asked. He hadn’t answered my question or given me the details I needed.

  “We’ve got our own police, you know. Our own school. Own doctor. Own coroner. We pay our taxes like everybody else and have virtually no crime. There’s nothing in the records that my father doesn’t want to be there.”

  I swallowed hard as a familiar pang of hopelessness burrowed its way into me like a disease. He was ignoring my question again, talking about things that wouldn’t help me escape. “Answer me, Joseph. What happened to your Aunt Mary?”

  “The authorities found nothing to back up her claims. All they saw were happy, well-adjusted children and loving families. However, they did find an entire file on my Aunt Mary showing years of delusional behavior complete with medication logs and a brief stint at a privately run, extremely exclusive psychiatric hospital.”

  I clenched my hands, desperately trying to make sense of what he was saying. “What? Are you telling me she was crazy?”

  Joseph crouched down in front of me, bringing himself to eye-level. “No, Dee. She was one of the sanest people I knew. But she did everything wrong. You can’t spout off to my father and threaten to leave. Because, like he did for you, he created a whole new identity for her. One that served his needs.”

  “But she got out!” I yelled, clinging to the hope that we could too.

  “Maybe, but nobody on the outside will ever believe a word she says about him or this town. He made sure of that.”

  “He can label me crazy all he wants, but I won’t stay here.”

  “We won’t stay,” he corrected me. “But I need you to play along and let him think he has the upper hand, at least until I can convince Eden to run.”

  “So I need to be Rebekah,” I whispered, locking my gaze with his. My stomach reeled when I thought about pretending to belong to Elijah. But, there it was. The only way out. The only way to get back to Luke and Mike.

  “And what then? What if Eden won’t leave? Do you plan to stay here and let him control you for the rest of your life
because she won’t go?”

  Joseph’s face fell at the prospect. “No. If she won’t go with us, then I’ll leave her here and get you home.”

  I picked up the papers and began reading over the details of my birth, my education, even my food preferences. The lies stretched on for pages, and I had to force myself to continue reading.

  I prayed Joseph was telling the truth. If he wasn’t … well, I had no problem leaving him behind.

  Twenty-One

  The springs of the bed creaked loudly, probably the third time in the last few minutes Joseph had adjusted his position. I could practically feel his body tensing every time I turned a page. He was getting anxious, nervous about how long it was taking me to memorize my new life.

  “Dee, it’s been thirty minutes now. I know my father told you to memorize it, but as long as he knows you’re trying, everything will be fine.”

  “I’m not taking any chances,” I said, only half-believing myself. I needed to be as convincing as possible, and memorizing as much as I could would only make it easier.

  I was approximately twenty pages deep into my made-up life when I stopped cold, the detailed timeline on the page startling me. “What is this?”

  Joseph leaned over and gave the sheet a quick glance. “The history of Purity Springs.”

  “Not that,” I said, brushing my hand over the two de-tailed paragraphs at the top of the page. “This.”

  I was staring at a timeline, a carefully maintained, handwritten timeline. Except this one didn’t keep track of births or political events. This one cataloged every single illness ever to strike the US, right down to geographical location and death toll.

  “Didn’t you read the last two pages? The ones that explain why the original ten families of Purity Springs banded together in the first place?” Joseph asked.

  “Ah … no.” I hadn’t read the entire thing. I’d mostly looked for information on Rebekah and other key facts I’d have to know to pull this off. I didn’t much care about the history of this insane town or the delusional reverend who’d founded it.

  I circled back two pages and tried to read it again. It was worse than my AP History book. Not wanting to waste what little time I had left digesting this crap, I turned toward Joseph and said, “Give me the condensed version.”

  He took the papers from my hand and turned so that he was facing me. “Fine, but pay attention,” he said, and I nodded. “August of 1854, Reverend Eli Smith Hawkins—”

  “Relative of yours?” I asked, interrupting him.

  “Yes, great-great-great-grandfather,” he said, his hand waving in the air as he ticked off each generation. “He lived in the SoHo district of London. Broad Street to be exact. There was a cholera outbreak that summer, and he watched over one hundred and twenty of his neighbors die within three days. Like most kids back then, he grew up on the stories of the Black Death and smallpox, believed the outbreak was God’s hand separating the evil from the good.”

  I chuckled at the “back then” comment. From where I was sitting, the people in this town were as ass-backward as their long-dead relatives. They still subscribed to all of that insane hand-of-evil crap.

  Joseph leveled a glare at me, one that said stop laughing and pay attention. I did, and found myself running through my European history class in my head, trying to place the words “Black Death.” I finally got it, and the haunting tune to “Ring Around the Rosie” invaded my brain as I recalled my limited knowledge of the plague.

  “Eli did what most people had been told to do. He locked himself inside his home and kept the windows shut, refusing visitors. But when one of his wife’s maids became violently ill, he decided to leave. He took twelve families from his congregation with him—only the strongest and healthiest, those who had shown no sign of illness—and came here.”

  “Fascinating,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “They settled in New York City. Six months later, one entire family had been wiped out from yellow fever. Within a year, another one had been lost to scarlet fever. That’s when Eli Hawkins moved the ten remaining families into the country, away from the sicknesses of the city and the evil surrounding his congregation.”

  Joseph flipped through the pages until he found the timeline I had questioned him about earlier. “Since then, the Hawkins family has kept track of each illness that has attacked the outside world. We viewed their downfall as proof that we are the chosen ones, the pure ones.”

  I scanned the timeline. Listed next to each disease was a date and the geographical location. Beside that was the death toll. 1918, Spanish flu, death toll: 500,000. 1952, polio, 57,628 cases reported. I jumped several entries to the end. 2009, H1N1, death toll: 3,900. From scarlet fever to chickenpox to swine flu, they had every single disease cataloged. This was paranoia at its finest.

  “What’s this number mean?” I asked, pointing to the column of zeroes that ran down the length of the page.

  “That’s the number of residents in Purity Springs who were infected by each particular illness.”

  “What!? You mean to tell me that not a single one of you has ever had the flu or strep throat, for God’s sake?” It was ridiculous. There was no way this group of people, divine or not, had never been sick.

  “No, we get sick. I mean, we’ve all gotten a fever or something at some point in our lives, but we’ve all been spared from this,” he said, tapping the paper.

  “But I saw the graveyard. People do die here. Surely your father must acknowledge that?”

  He nodded, a hint of frustration buried in his features. “He does, but most of them are old and ready to die anyway.”

  “You mother wasn’t,” I protested.

  “No she wasn’t,” he said, a tinge of anger lacing his words. “And others have died young, but they’re mostly women and children, followers of weak will.”

  People like me, I thought to myself. “And let me guess: your father uses this as proof to keep them all here, safe and free of the disease that lies beyond this town.”

  Joseph nodded. If I was reading him right, his look of confusion indicated that he didn’t understand why I was having such a hard time swallowing any of this. I mean, why would I? The proof was right there in black and white. The pure had been spared while the weak of will perished.

  “I had chickenpox when I was five,” I said, pulling up the hem of my skirt to show my lone chickenpox scar on my left calf. “And I’ve had strep throat three times in the last five years. Does that make me impure enough to leave?”

  Joseph smiled. It was sad and conciliatory, and I knew the answer before he spoke. “No. In his mind, that makes you stronger. It shows that you have the spirit and strength to survive. God spared your life when he could easily have taken it. My father won’t see that as a curse. He’ll see it as a blessing.”

  “Great,” I said. “Lucky me.”

  Twenty-Two

  I’d been alternating between disbelief and horror. Everyone here had been manipulated over time, their lives constructed by generations of lunatics.

  And I was next in line to become one of them.

  Joseph stood up and held out a hand for me to take. “You done reading?”

  I could read these files all day and I still wouldn’t be ready.

  “Come on,” he said, curling his fingers for me to take. “I promise that if you stick to the plan, it will all be fine.”

  Stacking the sheets together, I began mindlessly stuffing them back into the envelope. I’d been on overdrive since his father had left, racing frantically to come up with a better solution than the one I’d been handed. But nothing made any sense.

  “I’m not stupid,” Joseph said. “I know you think I’m weird and nuts like my father, but I’m not. I’m also not the only one here who wants out.”

  I stopped wrestling with the papers and turned my attention to him. No, I didn
’t think he was stupid or even weird. I thought he was downright delusional. “You said yourself that everybody out there accepts what your father is preaching. Even if we can convince Elijah to let his guard down, there’s no way these followers of his will simply let us walk out of here.” I motioned toward the window. “You think they’re just gonna let us take Eden and flip off everything your father stands for? Everything he’s taught them to believe?”

  Joseph sighed, the familiar look of exhaustion blanketing his features. “No. In fact, I’m sure my father will do everything in his power to make sure we stay.”

  “Exactly.” My voice came out louder than I’d expected, not a hint of negotiation present in my tone. “I’m not stupid either, and I’m not naïve enough to think I can take him on alone.”

  “You’re not alone.” Joseph’s expression was fierce, determined, but I didn’t believe him for one second. I was alone. Without Luke and Mike to back me up, then I was completely, utterly alone.

  “Even together, we can’t win against him. This town follows his every command, practically worships him. Two against a town of one hundred forty-eight? Those odds suck,” I said.

  “Maybe, but it’s not impossible. My Aunt Mary did it. My mother nearly made it. I did it myself, the day he killed her. We can do it too, Dee. We have to.”

  “In order for this to work, in order for use to even have a chance of getting Eden out of here, I need Luke and Mike.”

  “That’s not—”

  I flicked my hand in the air, stopping him. I didn’t need to trust Joseph or memorize the contents of Elijah Hawkins’s demented folder in order to survive. The only truth I’d come to realize during all this was that I needed Luke and his impulsive brother.

  “I want them here. I don’t believe you when you say they’re safe. I want to see for myself.” I paused briefly, then laid down an ultimatum of my own. “Besides, you said you were banking on them coming in here to get me out, right? I won’t help you, Joseph, not unless you bring them here.”