Threader God by Gerald Brandt

Author:Gerald Brandt [BRANDT, GERALD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Astra Publishing House
Published: 2022-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

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Darwin’s eyes adjusted to the near darkness of their hiding spot as he sat in an empty place near the covered entry. In the little light coming from the covered hole, he could make out the white ghostly faces of almost everyone. They all seemed to be looking at him, trying to figure out who the stranger was and why he was here. A figure emerged from further in, shuffling their feet so as to not step on anybody’s toes. The figure was only a few feet from him before he recognized it as Teresa.

She sat down beside him, searching for his hand and squeezing it tight once she found it. “He’ll be quiet now for a while,” she whispered. “I didn’t fix it. But I did take away some of the pain.”

Darwin nodded, noticing the faces now turned slightly in her direction.

They sat in the almost complete darkness for hours, the only sound the breathing of everyone in there. By the time George reopened the mat covering the entryway, the air had become stifling and the light coming in through the gaps had dimmed considerably. They followed him out with the rest of the group behind them, each person taking a different path from the hole to the corn field so there wouldn’t be a single track to their hiding place. Once there, they stood in a loose circle, careful not to step on the corn, and waited till everyone had come out. Each of them watched the dark smoke in the sky above their homes.

“How do you know they’re gone?” Darwin asked.

George tore his eyes away from the smoke. “We don’t,” he replied. “That’s why we stay down there so long. All we can do is take our best guess.” As the last of the people joined them, he turned and started moving in the direction of the smoke while Darwin and Teresa collected their bikes.

The town was already occupied by the time they got there, the majority of them in multiple bucket lines moving water from individual wells to the homes and businesses that the Skends had set on fire.

“Is it always this bad?” Darwin asked.

“No. Like I said, they usually leave us alone.” George grabbed a bucket from the person behind him and hoisted it to Darwin, water splashing over the edges. Darwin repeated the movement and turned back for the next one, becoming part of the assembly line. Once he had joined the brigade, he’d lost track of Teresa. She’d either joined another line or, more likely, was moving through the group looking for any injuries that she could heal.

Darwin didn’t know what the place had looked like before today, but from where he stood, most of the town had been destroyed by fire, and his hatred of Salem went up. Charred embers lay like broken soldiers in any nook and cranny they could find, and blackened stubs of timbers poked from the ground like sentinels watching over the dead. He

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