Page 3 of The Devil's Viking

Iris wavered now, felt her determination start to fall to pieces all around her. Then an image came to her, the one that haunted her dreams since she’d stopped going to sleep under the influence of a drug:

Lily’s naked, twisted body. Her blue, twisted face.

Fuck. This. I'm out of here.

This time when she stood, she stayed on her feet.

Her mind snapped back into focus and Iris suddenly knew – she justknew– that it was all going to be fine. She was sure that Gideon would call this feeling a premonition or destiny or some such crap, but Iris saw it for what it was: perfect planning and a teeth-gritting will to get it done.

Oh, and since I haveno choicebut to finish what I set in motion when I walk out into that hallway, I’m going to do this because it’s also life-and-death. Literally.

Despite the fact that the other women were drugged into deep sleep, Iris still found that she was channeling a ninja warrior vibe and moving across the floor as quietly as possible. She reached the open door, looked left then right, stepped into the wide, dark hallway and headed for the stairs. Even though she was totally confident in the knowledge that nobody was lurking in the stairwell waiting to pounce on her, she held her breath almost the whole time, not releasing it until she was standing on the ground floor.

Still in stealth mode, she headed to the library and made a beeline for the cabinet that housed Gideon’s sermons going back as far as fifteen years, when he’d founded The Garden of Divine Light. Iris herself had spent untold hours transcribing the recordings of his words and beliefs and commandments, then copying and binding them as books before placing them with proper reverence on the shelves and cataloguing them.

Ignoring the camera above her, she reached past the first two rows of books until her fingertips grazed the back wall of the shelf. She pried the yellow envelope from between volumes 156 and 157 and checked to see that it was still glued down; it was, and this meant that she held in her hand a total of three hundred and twelve dollars. It was all that she had in the world and she was just going to have to figure it out from there, because she didn’t dare to steal any more money from Gideon.

Iris exited the library and turned left to the back entrance hall area. There she found flashlights, shoes, boots and coats belonging to the men and the Guardians – she’d have to make do with what she could get her hands on because the women-servants weren’t given outdoor apparel for a biting February night in Utah. Oh sure, each woman had a heavy sweater that was fine for quickly running out to deliver food and hot drinks to the guards, but that was it. The women’s daily uniform was a thin dress, flat shoes and something to hold back their long hair – an elastic, pins, a barrette, a kerchief.

And of course, an apron.Thatwent without saying.

She scanned the clothes hanging off various hooks and found a heavy cardigan and a thick coat with a hood. She stuffed the money, a flashlight and two scarves into the coat pockets, added a hat and mittens, then quickly measured the boots with her eye, looking for the smallest pair. Once she found them and pulled them on, they were still pretty big so she tugged the laces as tight as possible. It was the best that she could do, so she accepted it.

There was no mirror, naturally, because Gideon said that they encouraged vanity (though his own lavish bedroom had mirrors everywhere), so Iris couldn’t see what she looked like. She pictured a clown in oversized, flapping footwear crossed with a kid playing dress-up in her Dad’s winter overcoat, and figured that was about right. But looking ludicrous wasn’t her concern: not freezing to death was. She wasn’t heading out to be a fashion icon – she was running for her life, floppy boots and all.

Now she sank to her knees on the wooden floor and tugged a pin out of her hair; all the doors were locked from the inside at ten o’clock. In less than forty seconds, she’d unlocked the door to the yard outside and was back on her feet. She swung the door open and shivered at the blast of freezing wind.

Nothing and nobody to the left, nor to the right. The outside field area was still and empty in the moonlight, and she took a deep breath.

“OK,” she said out loud and hearing her own voice seemed to steady her. “Here we go.”

Iris tugged the coat tighter around her to protect herself from the cold, then she paused. A wild burst of stupid courage rose in her, higher and stronger, a roaring rebelliousneedto say a few defiant words on her way out the door. A final departing shot like an old Western, a cutting one-liner just before blowing someone’s face off like a mafia movie. Justsomething.

But words had never been her strong suit – not even back before she was Iris – so instead she looked up at the camera above the door, stared deep into its emotionless black eye. Then she gave it a huge, beaming smile – and raised her middle finger, picturing Gideon watching the video of this moment the next morning.

Fuck. You.

Stepping out of the building was the strangest combination of terrifying and elating, and Iris took a deep, calming breath. The two Guardians at the front gate were snug and warm in their little building, just sitting there and drinking coffee from thermoses and eating sandwiches that Iris herself had made them earlier. She knew that they wouldn’t budge from their chairs, not even to do a perimeter lap, because what for? They had the motion sensors to do the work for them – but she knew all the blind spots and safe spots.

When she had first started planning her escape, Iris had toyed with the idea of drugging the Guardians’ nightly coffee, since she was in charge of preparing all their food. She imagined herself waltzing past the two slumbering forms, right on out the front gate, a triumphant exit with dignity and sass.

After several nights’ contemplation she rejected that notion, simply because it had too many unknowns: what if only one of them had coffee that night? What if they only had one sip each? What if they were sleeping and another Guardian happened by, wandering aimlessly waiting for Gideon to finish the Ritual, and he sounded the alarm when he couldn’t rouse them from their drug-induced stupor? What if they spilled the thermos’ contents? And so on and so on, too many ‘what ifs’ and ‘maybes’ and she realized that she had to find a more controlled way out, even if that meant with the guards awake.

And then she’d found the way.

She turned right now, away from the guardhouse, and headed for the chain-link fence area closest to the woods. There was a loose section there where one of the metal posts had pulled away and out of the earth a bit; Iris had made a point of walking past it a few times when she’d brought the men their coffee outside in the yard, and she knew that she could slide through the gap. She was very small – well,allthe woman-servants were, it was Gideon’s preference and he starved them so they were even smaller – and she was pretty flexible.

Less than a minute later, she had poked the flashlight through the holes in the fence, taken off her heavy coat, thrown it over and clear of the barbed wire at the top of the chain-link mesh, and was on her stomach sliding under the fence. The space between the hard ground and the bottom of the fence wasn’t very wide, and the chain-link edges caught on the oversized cardigan as she pulled herself under and through. She thought that she’d made it – when something snagged and held. Iris flailed and twisted and turned this way and that, desperately trying to get loose.

No go. Argh.

With a huge sigh, she wriggled out of the unbuttoned cardigan and then she was on her feet on the other side. She pulled on the cardigan, pulled hard, and with a horrible loudripit came free, now with a sizable tear down the back. She didn’t care, she barely paused as she stuck her arms through the sleeves, put on the coat, hat and mittens, and wrapped one scarf around each of her bare legs. She turned on the flashlight and aimed the beam at the trees looming in front of her.

“OK,” she again, this time to the stars above. “Let’s start walking.”

There was a town called Walton in this direction, she knew. She was the twelfth of Gideon’s twelve women-servants, so she didn’t have the privilege of being driven to the store to do the food shopping, but she’d asked Marigold, Azalea and Posy about their trips out of the compound and she knew that the town was about forty-five minutes away by car, pretty much a straight shot down the road. She figured that she could walk it – keeping to the trees and with the slight obstacles of snow and some hilly mountain terrain – in three hours at most.

Walton had a bus station that ran buses all through the night andthiswas the part that gave her the most pause and worry: once her absence was discovered, Gideon and his Guardians would head straight to town, straight to the bus station, straight to asking questions. Iris would have been happiest just disappearing without a trace, vanishing in a puff of smoke and with no trail behind her whatsoever, but this was the reality that she was dealing with. There would be a bus ticket and there would be at least one person who’d see her get on the bus; she knew that she’d have to get off before whatever her actual ticket destination was, switch routes and directions, start throwing up dirt and causing confusion.

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