The Falling Away
THE
FALLING
AWAY
Other Books by T.L. Hines
Waking Lazarus
The Dead Whisper On
The Unseen
Faces in the Fire
THE
FALLING
AWAY
T.L. HINES
© 2010 by T.L. Hines
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansâelectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherâexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published in Nashville, Tennessee by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.
Published in association with the literary agency of Alive Communications, Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, CO 80920.
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.
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Publisher's Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.
Scripture references are taken from the New King James Version. © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hines, T. L.
The falling away / T.L. Hines.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-59554-454-4 (pbk.)
1. Indians of North AmericaâFiction. 2. SupernaturalâFiction. I. Title.
PS3608.I5726F35 2010
813'.6âdc22
2010021109
Printed in the United States of America
10 11 12 13 14 15 RRD 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Iraq and Afghanistan veterans
While we were People of the Earth, when the birds and animals could talk, some of us wanted to fight each other. They wanted warfare. They approached our Creator and asked if they could fight each other. Our Creator said, “First you must prove to me that you are men enough to fight.” He placed a man with a bow and arrow at the bottom of a sheer cliff in the water and told the men to dive off the cliff, but they soon changed their minds once they saw the man with his bow and arrow cocked and ready to shoot anyone who dove off the cliff.
Finally one man walked up to the cliff and dove off into the water. He lay dead in the water with an arrow protruding from his collarbone and blood streaming from his nostrils. Our Creator said, “I won't make too many of him, [and] from this day forward, [I will] try to wipe him out.” From that time we have been called Biiluke. Even unto this day we still refer to ourselves as Biiluke.
H
ISTORY OF THE
A
PSÃALOOKE
(C
ROW
P
EOPLE
),
CROWTRIBE.COM
Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition.
2 T
HESSALONIANS
2:3
It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
H
EBREWS
10:31
CONTENTS
Having your leg almost blown off was much easier than having it reassembled, regrafted, and rehabilitated.
The blowing-your-leg-off thing, well, that was quick. Easy. Automatic. You just join the army, deploy to Baghdad with the 710th Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company, and start taking daily missions to seek and destroy improvised explosive devices. IEDs.
Better known as roadside bombs.
After 237 days in Iraq, after some three hundred successful missions fueled by radio jammers and armor-plated robots, you find out that your high-tech gadgets can't stop all the low-tech explosives when a farmer and a donkey find a hidden pressure plate behind you.
Dylan should have considered himself lucky. Claussen, the second man in his three-person squad, shielded him from most of the blast. Claussen was the one who insisted they scavenge for extra iron and steel around Baghdad, haul it back to their workshop at Camp Victory, and weld it to their Humvee for extra protection. In a cruel, ironic twist, it hadn't been the hillbilly armor on their Humvee that had taken the blast. It had been Claussen himself.
Lucky
, of course, wasn't the word Claussen would have used. He would have said
chosen
. Did say chosen, in factâhe told Dylan they were
chosen
many times in their months together.
Claussen always said that like it was a Good Thing. Dylan knew better now.
And once again, the whole blowing-up bit, that was the easy part. How long had the explosion lasted? Couple of seconds, followed by the hollow echo of the blast reverberating, something Dylan hadn't heard because his ears had only picked up a steady whine, as if one long, looping broadcast of the Emergency Broadcast System were playing inside his head.
Then it was over. Not even painful, really, even as one of the 68-Whiskeys, the combat medics, screamed inside the chaos while hovering over him. Not that he'd heard the medic screamingâthat high-pitched whine drowned out everything for Dylanâbut he could tell the medic was screaming because even when you watch a silent movie, you get a sense of what's happening on the screen.
The pain didn't sink its jaws into him until he awoke the next morning. Which suggested he had drifted to sleep, or something like it, during that night. Maybe that afternoon. He didn't remember much of that, didn't remember much of anything following the boom-of-the-Humvee/whine-of-the-ears/scream-of-the-medic sequence.
Which was just as well, perhaps, because it saved him from the first part of the reassemble-the-muscle/regraft-the-skin/rehabilitate-the-leg sequence.
That part was most definitely filled with screams as well. Screams he heard quite well, because they were his own.
That bothered him, the inability to remember, because Dylan was precise. Part of what had drawn him to enlisting; he found comfort in the delineations and absolute order of military life. Waking at the same time each day, eating at the same time, following exact orders, reporting detailed observations. It was all about order, compartmentalization, numbers. Comfort.
“I said, you want some more coffee?”
Dylan blinked his eyes, feeling their dryness for the millionth time, resisted the urge to rub them. Rubbing them only made it worse. He focused on Webb, sitting in the passenger seat of the pickup. Granular snow, buffeted by the wind of the eastern Montana plains, sprayed against the window that framed Webb's scruffy face. Old, gritty snow, punished by the ever-present winds. It reminded him of the gritty sand of Iraq in some ways. Even sitting here in the opposite temperature extreme.
You're not in Iraq
, a voice said inside his head.
Thanks for pointing that out, Joni
, he answered mentally.
Just saying
.
Well, just don't. Not right now
.
Dylan let out a long breath, looked at Webb, shook his head. “Nah, I'm good. I'm golden.” He glanced at his watch; they had been parked here exactly seventeen minutes and thirty-two seconds.
“Yeah, you're the golden boy.” Webb unscrewed the cap of the metal thermos, poured some dark, lukewarm liquid into a mug that said
I won a pullet surprise!
on the chipped exterior.
“Why don't you get a travel mug?” Dylan asked. “Actually keep your coffee warm.”
Webb took a drink from his stained mug, smacked his lips extravagantly. “Give up my lucky pullet surprise cup? Not until you pull it from my cold, dead hands.”
“Yeah, well, your hands are cold because your coffee's always cold.”
Webb shrugged. “Least my cup's always half full. You're the guy who looks at everything half empty.”
He's got a point there
, Joni's voice said inside his head.
Dylan looked out his own window, watched the winds whipping snow into fresh images of ghosts and monsters. “Nah. It's usually totally empty.” He was answering both of them, Joni and Webb.
“Touché. How 'bout a bump?”
Dylan turned to look again at Webb, who had pulled out a prescription bottle. He shook it, rattling the tablets inside. There would be sixty-two tablets inside, Dylan knew. A full month's prescription of Percocet, with instructions to take twice daily for pain.
“Little bon voyage gift from Krunk,” Webb continued. “He gave them to me so you wouldn't gobble them.”
“I'm good.” Mostly because he'd already popped three Perks that morning. Had a secret stash neither Webb nor Krunk knew about.
Webb shrugged, slipped the pills back into his pocket. “Got 'em when you need 'em.”
Webb's coat was a powder blue, down-filled monstrosity that made him look like a large blue marshmallow. Dylan had counted seventeen horizontal lines of stitching from the neck of the coat to the elastic band at the bottom.
Webb had a little bit of padding beneath that coat as well; he was the kind of guy the old Sears catalogs would have called “husky” on their pages devoted to flannel shirts and work boots. The dark, short-cropped beard only added to the rustic lumberjack look.
“You need to relax, man,” Webb said, smiling. “Hogeland's the closest townâand that barely shows up on the map. Not exactly a hot spot for the border patrol.”
They were just south of the Canadian border, an endless expanse of white enveloping the plains. Across the dappled haze in front of them lay the Great White North of Canada. Soon someone would appear at the end of this road, that was really little more than a set of tracks in the thin snow, and meet them for a drop. At least that's what Dylan had been told. He'd feel better about the whole thing when it was done.
Told you not to come
, Joni's voice whispered.
I knew it was a mistake. You knew it was a mistake
.
I told you: Not now, Joni
.
Just saying
.
Just don't
.
“You think the Feds are worried about us,” Webb continued, evidently feeling the need to lecture, “when Mexicans are sneaking hash and Mary Jane into Arizona and Texas? We're in the middle of Nowhere, Montana, picking up some Perks and Vikes. Not even illegal.”
“Unless you're smuggling a couple thousand caps across the Canadian border,” Dylan said, staring out the windshield now, hoping to see some sign of a vehicle.
Webb shrugged, took another sip of his kinda coffee. “You say tomato, I say tomahto. Governor of Montana brought drugs across the Canadian border when he was running his campaign.”