And if anyone summoned up a demon, it was you.”
Joshua’s eyes went wide. Clearly he had never been accused of witchcraft.
“Did you, Preacher Jackson, bite your concubines?” Sister Erasmus demanded, bringing the accusation back to Jackie. “Did you harm them in ways no decent man would, like some kinda vampire, biting them for their blood?”
At that, Jackie lunged for the podium. Elder Aden’s gun tracked him, but the older man hesitated an instant too long and didn’t fire. Jackie pulled a huge gun. He pointed it at me. And everything went to hell in a handbasket.
FIFTEEN
I remembered Rick’s comment about a Mexican standoff, and for half a second, this looked like the same thing, except no one here would heal easily from gunshot wounds. We’d bleed and die like regular humans. That was the thought I had before Jackie’s gun thundered, reverberating blamblamblam in the tall ceilings, the shots loud and too fast.
I had a moment’s thought about the training Daddy had given his family, because all of them hit the floor as the first shot was fired, all but me. Daddy shoved me into the pew, to the floor, where I landed on top of Mama and a passel of Nicholson young’uns who were crawling for the exits. Daddy’s shotgun blasted twice, then several others. Daddy fell on top of me, and his blood pulsed across my face. Without thinking, I pulled off the scarf Mama had wrapped me in, shoved it deep into Daddy’s wound, and covered it with my hand, pressing. The pulsing stopped, but the gunfire went on. Deafening, breath-stealing, glass-shattering booms that went on forever. I could make out screaming, Some of it from the Nicholsons below and around me. Mama and Mud were still here, and my sister pulled off her jacket, applying it to another gunshot, this one a leaking hole in Daddy’s leg, not the pulsing mess I was trying to stifle. Mud looked mad. Determined. Not afraid. Mama stretched out beside us, holding John’s old revolver, which had tumbled in the carnage, as if she knew how to use it. The gunfight blasted away the dawn. Screams. Deafening concussions. Mama fired my gun at someone in the aisle.
Mama Carmel crawled across the empty space under the pew in front and slid up to Daddy, adding a pile of clean cloth diapers to my scarf. I had stopped breathing, and I remembered to inhale only when the blackness of oxygen deprivation closed in on my eyesight and I was near to passing out. With the breath came thoughts from my self-schooling, my mind bombarding me with trivia, searching for a way out of this. A quote by Patton came to me, one by Sun Tzu, both useless.
Then one by Harry Truman came to me, saying, “Carry the battle to them.”
“Yeah,” I whispered to myself. Now, that was helpful.
I rolled out from under Daddy so Mama Carmel could get to him better, and I took his shotgun with me. I felt around in his jacket pockets and found four more shotgun shells. In the cramped quarters, Daddy bleeding and maybe dying on one side, and the Nicholson women on my other side, I reloaded the shotgun.
Someone grabbed my arm and I jerked away, but it was only Priss, my sister, lying with her sister wife on the floor behind us, under the Campbell pew. Cowering. And that made me madder. We women didn’t need to be cowering on the floor. We needed to be taking the battle to Jackie and whoever was helping him. We needed to be fighting back. Protecting ourselves, not waiting on a man to save us. But it would kill my sister to shoot another person. And I had ample proof that I wouldn’t give a moment’s thought about it.
At that thought, the awareness of blood, rich and thick and full of life, hit me. Blood everywhere. So much blood. But it wasn’t on the ground and not on Soulwood, and the longing to take it for the land was muted. But the longing for vengeance beat in me, like a drum through my veins.
“Stay down,” I shouted to Mud and Priss and the other Nicholson women. Mama shouted my name as I crawled to the front of the church, in the shadows beneath the pews, my knees and toes and elbows pushing and pulling me forward, my skirt dragging. Wishing I was in my overalls.
I reached the front of the church and spotted Jackie crouched behind the pulpit.