Rejoice in Eternal Darkness
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Aren't you that PBM? Middleman. At your service, doctor. Don't you get rebates that save money on medicines? Oh, PBMs like me get big rebates. So why do patients tell me they're worried about their costs? No one says we have to share the savings with patients. Congress should make sure medicine savings go directly to patients, not middlemen. Visit prma.org slash middlemen to learn more. Paid for by Pharma.

Seth was the first one to die. That's how I knew we were getting close. Saul, Rico, and I awoke on our second day in and found that he was missing. His one-person hiking tent was open, sleeping bag yawning like a giant, dead worm. None of us panicked. Even when we moved off into the woods and found Seth's mutilated corpse, we didn't panic.

Saul, who had always been quiet, simply stood by, staring at Seth's body, taking in all the horrible things they'd done to him. Even so, I could hear the grinding of his teeth. I had forgotten that he did that when he was really, truly angry. The last time I heard it was a lifetime ago, when we were in uniform in a sweaty, dusty, stinking excuse for a country.

Rico's reaction was also in line with what I remembered about him under pressure. He let loose a string of vehement curses under his breath. But he didn't yell, he didn't scream, and he didn't make a scene. He was smarter than that. As for me, I didn't need to study Seth's body. Just a glance was enough to sear the scene into my memory. He lay against a pile of debris washed against a fallen tree by the flood, about 20 feet from the creek.

My guess was he'd gotten up to take a piss. That was when it happened. What I couldn't figure out was how the killer had done it without alerting the rest of us. Sure, the plastic-handled dish scrubber sticking out of his mouth could have had something to do with it. But even when you have a dish scrubber shoved down your throat, there are other ways to make noise. The scrubber spoke to the killer's state of mind. I was sure he had picked it up from the ground nearby.

The trail along the creek was littered with trash from the flood, detritus of civilization, washed out of people's homes somewhere upstream. The only thing I can think is that he did it fast. Somehow, he snuck up on Seth, jammed the dish scrubber in his mouth, and then stabbed him up through the ribs, puncturing his lungs. Seth wasn't wearing a shirt, probably because it was so hot last night, so it wasn't hard for me to spot the stab wounds.

Some kind of knife, surely. A long one. Maybe even a combat knife. Like the one Seth should have been carrying when he went to take a piss. The rest, the killer probably did as Seth drowned in his own blood. Slicing open his stomach and pulling his intestines out. Pulling his jeans down and cutting his genitals off. Stabbing his eyes out. A message. Clear and obvious.

It might as well have been spelled in his blood: "Turn back now or else." But that wasn't going to happen. Especially not now. If this fucker knew a thing about who was after him, he'd know that killing one of us would have the opposite of a chilling effect.

It would make us come harder, faster, and with no hesitation. After my initial glimpse of Seth's body, taking everything in and filing it away to be used at the proper time, I turned and scanned the woods. I figured he might be watching, probably from far off and through a scope. When I felt the time was right, I said, "We go fast and hard from now on. If you want out, go now. I won't hold it against you.

"It's my daughter they've got. It's not your fight. I won't think any less of you." Rico scoffed. But I didn't take any disrespect. I knew what the scoff meant. "The hell it's not our fight." "Marlin!" Saul said. He waited until I looked into his earnest face before speaking further. "Lead the fucking way!" I nodded. "We'll come back to bury him when we're done." We went back to camp and got our stuff together, leaving our tents and sleeping bags. We were close now.

If we slept, we could do so in our clothes, in shifts, with our weapons nearby. But I wasn't planning on sleeping. Not until I had finished with this fucker, whoever he was. As we marched into the woods, all I could think about was hugging my daughter again and telling her I loved her. If God could give me those two things, I would take back all the terrible things I had said about him over the years. Just one hug and three little words. It all started with a flood.

The once every hundred years kind. My daughter, a nurse with a heart too big for her own good, decided to volunteer to help on a rescue crew. While the flood had done several million dollars in property damage in the town where we lived, there was an even smaller town up in the woods called Ryland that had nearly been wiped off the map. It was a tiny town, with a tight-knit community seemingly stuck in the past.

I hadn't even heard of it until my daughter said she was going up there with a small group of rescue workers. The one road up to the town had been wiped out, and the damage caused by the flood had made that route dangerous. So it was going to be a hike over the mountain from the opposite side. Two of Mindy's favorite things: hiking and helping people. The second to last time I heard from her, she sent me a text saying service was spotty but that they were approaching Ryland.

The last time I heard from her was a few hours later, and the message was only one word. The police had their hands full with other things, and when I told them of the situation, they said there was a cop with the group, some young guy who had been on the force for all of eight months. They radioed him, and he said everything was hunky-dory, code for no assistance needed.

but I knew something was wrong. And I wasn't about to sit on my ass and do nothing, waiting for the roads to be cleared or rebuilt. Saul and Rico had already been in town. Once they saw on the news that my town had taken much of the flood damage, they came. They just showed up while I was still seeing what kind of damage had been done to my property. Seth only met us later, after I received the concerning text from Mindy. Saul called him and asked if he was up for a mission.

Seth didn't hesitate. He met us at the trailhead and we all started off together, just like the old days. But now we were no longer full of piss and testosterone. We had aching joints and graying hair, and we'd grown comfortable in our suburban lives, having worked hard to leave the war behind. Now, one of us was dead, brutally murdered in the middle of the night, and it was my fault.

I should have known something like this could happen. I should have made sure that we were all taking this as seriously as we'd taken the war. But I didn't. Instead, I treated it like a fucking camping trip, thinking we could handle whatever Mindy had gotten into. I figured it was a peckerhead who wanted money, or a meth addict making the mistake of his life. I hadn't expected anything like this. Anything so vicious. I should have. I, of all people, should have.

I was intimately familiar with what people were capable of. I'd seen it done. Hell, I'd done it to others. Stupid. Seth's death was my fault. I wasn't about to let it happen again. Rico took point, scouting ahead as we moved quickly up the mountain. He disappeared into the foliage, getting far enough ahead to scope out our path and, hopefully, get a glimpse of whoever was out there, if anyone still was.

Saul and I moved steadily, trying to stick to the trail when we could. The flooding had washed mud and debris and trees all over the place, so the trail wasn't always clear. I carried my Remington 700 long-range rifle, safety on and one in the chamber. Saul carried a Springfield Armory Saint M-LOK that fired NATO 5.56 rounds and featured an 11 cartridge capacity.

Rico carried a Springfield Armory M1A Scout Squad 308, which also had an 11-cartridge capacity. Plus, all three of us carried pistols and combat knives. That was probably why we weren't dead. Whoever had killed Seth was scared of all of our firepower. As we neared the top of a ridge, Saul and I came upon Rico sitting on a rock, waiting for us. The look on his face kept our mouths shut, and we crouched next to him.

He's out there alright, but I can't seem to catch a glimpse of him. He moves too damn fast. You're sure there's only one? Rico considered this for a moment. Not completely sure, no. Could be two, I guess. Or more. That could explain how they move so fast. Could just be leapfrogging each other. I nodded and peered around through the woods. Summer was officially over, but it was still unseasonably warm, despite the smattering of changing leaves here and there.

I wondered what was keeping him from shooting at us. Maybe he wasn't a good shot, or maybe he knew he wouldn't last long once he gave away his position. "If you find some good ground for an ambush, let me know," I told Rico. "If we can get the drop on him, we should do it. But I'd like to talk with them if possible." Rico grimaced but nodded. "Got it. I'll keep an eye out." The only thing keeping us alive was the fact that we stayed fairly close together.

If we split up and tried to flush the guy out and failed, he could pick us off one by one. I wasn't ready to take that chance. I still had hope of getting to the town, Ryland, and getting some intel about what may have happened to Mindy and her group. We drank some water and ate a snack. In five minutes, we were moving again. Rico on point once more, pulling ahead of us. As we hustled through the woods, I tried to ignore my increasingly heavy pack.

the twinge in my right knee, and the feeling of being watched that seated itself right at the base of my skull. It was early afternoon when we came upon Rico again. This time, he was sitting just up the way from a dirt road. "We're close to Ryland, but the guy is still with us, still watching." I resisted the urge to look around again, picturing the smile on the man's face. Instead, I looked at Rico and then Saul, thinking, weighing our options.

"What do you think, Sol?" His small, deep-set eyes fixed on mine, their dark brown color making them hard to read under the shadowy shelf of his brow. "It's up to you, Marlin. I'm with you. What about you?" "I'd like to stay up here while you guys go see what you can learn in town," Rico said. "Maybe I can go down with you, and then turn back around to see if I can head him off. And if you can't," Rico grinned, "then may the best man win."

I thought of Seth's mutilated body lying against the pile of debris. The degradation. The humiliation. For a moment, I couldn't swallow, although my mouth filled with hot saliva. My mind tried to put Mindy in Seth's place. It tried to imagine what could have been done to her. But I stopped that train of thought cold, although it took some effort. It would do no good thinking about what-ifs. "No," I said finally. "No. We need to stick together."

Rico shook his head. "Bullshit! I can take this asshole, I know it!" I said, "No, Amaya. We stick together until we see what we find in Ryland." Rico grumbled, but nodded in acknowledgement. Not wanting to be in the open just yet, we decided to stay off the road, instead moving through the woods. Soon, we brought the tiny town of Ryland into view. I had no idea what the town had looked like before the flooding.

But now, it was little more than a loose collection of buildings clustered around a creek. The valley in which the town sat was steep on both sides, which allowed us to look down onto the community from a ridge. The streets were still covered in mud, cars were in disarray, and everywhere I looked was debris of some kind. I saw no movement in the town, which made me more than a little uneasy. No one seemed to be making an effort to clean up the streets or clear the debris.

From the research I'd done before leaving on this journey, I had learned that the last census put the population of Ryland at just under 300 people. Some of them had left, having received enough warning to know what they were in for. But according to testimony from one resident who'd made it out, a few percent of the town stayed behind. Still, that was somewhere around 60 or 70 people. I expected most of them to be out and about,

Surely there had been survivors. I didn't think they'd all been killed during the flooding. The three of us surveyed the town from the ridge, waiting for something to happen, for some movement. After several minutes of eerie stillness, Rico spoke. He's gone. I turned to look at him. What do you mean? Didn't you feel that? The change? I mean he's gone. He's no longer tracking us. How can you be so sure? Saul asked. Rico shrugged. I'm not. At least not 100%.

"But I'm pretty sure." "Tell me if that changes," I said. "Get your radios ready and let's get down there. Frosty is a fucking snowman, here? Roger that." Both men answered.

Hey, aren't you that PBM? Middleman. At your service, doctor. Don't you get rebates that save money on medicines? Oh, PBMs like me get big rebates. So why do patients tell me they're worried about their costs? No one says we have to share the savings with patients. Congress should make sure medicine savings go directly to patients, not middlemen. Visit prma.org slash middlemen to learn more. Paid for by Pharma.

♪♪♪

As soon as we set foot in the town, I knew something was wrong. The place felt off. It reminded me of walking into a village after the Taliban had been through, leaving behind dead bodies and broken families. The sun was still up, but it was creeping toward the western wall of the valley, so we would be losing light soon. Unlike our time in the service, we didn't have fancy night optic devices to help us with that.

We only had flashlights and the eyesight of men on the wrong side of middle age. I glanced at my two friends. "Let's start knocking on doors, but stay close, within sight." The part of town we were in, on the eastern edge, was mostly houses. Although we weren't far from what passed for the commerce section of the town, we split up, each taking a house. The door to the one I approached was already open, but I knocked anyway. There was no answer, but there was a smell.

A rotten smell that I knew well. There was a dead body inside, somewhere. I had no doubt. I wondered if it had something to do with the flood. I could see how high the water had gotten from marks left on the door. The line was up to my knees as I stood directly in front of the door. Survivable, if you were smart and careful. After shifting my rifle back on its strap and pulling my .45 out of its holster, I shoved the door open all the way and ventured inside.

I found the source of the smell in the back bedroom. It wasn't one body, it was two. It took all I had not to throw up as I surveyed the horror arrayed before me. It was an elderly couple. The man had been crucified on the bedroom wall, large nails through his hands and into studs behind the drywall. His feet had been chopped off and were nowhere that I could see.

The culprit had put makeshift tourniquets made of nylon rope on his shins, apparently to keep him from bleeding out too quickly. He'd been tortured, mangled, and savaged. But the worst part was that the old woman had been strapped into a wooden chair and forced to watch. Several of her fingers had been lopped off, and the severed digits still lay on the muddy carpet at the foot of the chair. Proof this had been done after the flood, sometime in the last three days.

A strange message was scrawled on the wall behind the old woman, whose throat had been cut to end her life. I was guessing the culprit used her blood to write the message. It read: "Rejoice in eternal darkness." I walked quickly back outside and into the middle of the mud-coated street. I brought my rifle up and peered at the steep valley walls surrounding the town of Ryland.

I wanted to scream at the person or people who had done this. But before I could, I felt an arm on my shoulder. Saul stood behind me, the confused look on his face telling me that he hadn't seen anything like what I'd seen. Not yet. "What's wrong? Dead bodies?" I said, pointing at the house. Two of them, mutilated, before Saul could say anything. An anguished yell, followed immediately by a gunshot, sounded from within the house Rico had gone to search.

We both whipped our rifles up and ran toward the house, boots squelching in the mud. Upon reaching the door, we formed up for entry. Me first and Saul right behind me. "Rico!" I shouted. "We're coming in!" We rushed into the one-story structure like we were back in Afghanistan, clearing houses. I followed Rico's boot prints through the front rooms and toward the back of the house. There was another set of fresh prints in the mud, made by bare feet.

Some of them obscured Rico's footprints, leaving no doubt that they had been made after he'd come through. Someone had been in the house waiting for him, and they followed him down the hall. Bile rose in my throat, and I had to push images of Seth's mangled body from my mind. My discipline was slipping. I'd been out for too long. I'd grown too soft. I pushed these thoughts away as I came to a bedroom to find Rico lying face down on the mud-coated floor.

A window above the bed was open, a muddy print on the windowsill. I peered out the window, looking for movement and seeing none. Saul came in behind me, and we both knelt to deal with Rico. I could see his blood pouring onto the mud, filling in the divots of footprints, shifting my rifle so it hung around my back. I turned Rico over in the narrow space between the wall and the bed. It had been a child's room, and I had to swipe some mud-coated toys out of the way.

As soon as I got a good look at Rico, I knew there was nothing we could do. His throat had been torn open, and his eyes were a gory mess. The killer had swiped his blade across Rico's eyes either before or after cutting his throat open. My vision blurred with violent dread. The sound of Saul's teeth grinding filled my ears. I sat back against the wall, but as I did so, I noticed something on the floor behind Saul.

There were bare footprints in the mud right in front of the closed closet door. Something clicked in my mind, and the sound of blood rushing through my head grew loud enough to drown out Saul's grinding teeth. With the slowness of a car crash, I realized just how sloppy I had been. How we'd all been. The closet door swung open. A man covered in mud appeared grinning from the darkness. His wide eyes stark white against his mud-coated face.

He had his teeth bared, but they were rotten, the same color as the mud. He lunged out of the closet, a bone-handled hunting knife in his right hand. Scrambling for my pistol, I opened my mouth to warn Saul, but all that came out was an idiotic outrushing of breath. I was too late. The man crashed into Saul, their momentum sending them both into me.

I pulled my pistol out just a second before they hit me, Saul's face crashing into my chest and the mud-covered man grunting on top of him, thrusting his knife into Saul's back. I fought to get my pistol up as Saul struggled on top of me, whimpering as the knife plunged between and under his ribs. I got my left hand up and swung at the man, but I wasn't in a good position for power, and my fist just glanced off his chin.

It did little more than make him mad. He pulled his knife out of saw and sent it down toward my face. I got my left hand up to block it. The blade sliced through the flesh between my thumb and index finger, bouncing off course, but not quite enough. It sunk through my right cheek, the blade clinking off my clenched teeth and bouncing away. I still couldn't get my pistol up all the way, but I knew I had no more time.

The man recovered and grabbed my left hand, yanking it out of the way. I aimed my pistol as best I could with Saul's head still pressing against my upper arm. I fired twice. One bullet tore through Saul's chest and punched into the man's stomach. The other one pulverized my friend's insides and hit the killer in his leg.

Neither were fatal shots because of the loss of velocity after traveling through Saul. But the man fell back, his weight coming off us. Finally, I pulled my right arm out. Just as the man realized he wasn't dead and started toward me, I fired four more times, hitting him four times in the chest. He collapsed on top of us once again. But this time he was dead weight and the knife was no threat.

I pushed both men off me and stood up, hand bleeding badly, cheek torn open, several teeth cracked. I told myself that I'd had to do it, that I had to shoot through Saul. I told myself that he would have been dead either way. That's what I told myself, but I didn't believe it.

I looked down at my two dead friends and at the man who had killed at least one of them. Stepping over to the mud-covered man, I slammed my heel into his face again and again until I grew lightheaded and remembered my injuries. I stumbled out of the house and shouted my daughter's name as the sun finally dipped below the western valley wall. Just one more hug and three little words. That's all I wanted.

Thank you.

and people helping truckers fill up and get maintenance at our convenient locations. They're part of the more than 300,000 jobs BP supports across the country. Learn more at BP.com/InvestingInAmerica. The church crouched on a little hill, and it looked as if it had been spared from the worst of the flooding. I approached it warily, my pistol up, eyes drawn to the chains wrapped around the front door handles.

It was approaching full darkness now, and I hadn't even checked half the buildings in town. But I was feeling more like myself again. After losing it for a minute, I had managed to claw my senses back. Mindy hadn't answered my calls, and I knew I had to get my bleeding under control, or I would be no use to her or anyone. So I had found a quiet spot with good cover, and dressed my wounds as best I could.

I would need stitches, and the gash through my cheek kept bleeding into my mouth. But it was the best I could do with the supplies on hand. Maybe once I found Mindy, she could help me dress them a little better. She was a nurse, after all. But right now, I was focused on the church, wondering why the doors had been chained up. It was a small, white, wooden building complete with a steeple and stained glass windows flanking the sides.

I figured there was a back door. But before I went searching, I wanted to see if anyone was inside. I moved up to one of the windows and tried to peer inside. But I couldn't see anything. Next, I knocked on the window. A chorus of whimpering came from inside. Desperate people, calling for help, but unable to speak because they were gagged.

Using the butt of my pistol, I broke a window panel and peered inside, seeing dozens of dead bodies littering the pews and the floor. Among the bodies were living people, struggling against their binds, looking up at me with a flicker of hope in their eyes. I figured the cop was among them, forced by the killers to tell his friends in uniform that everything was okay, but it was hard to see, and everyone was covered in blood.

The nave looked like a killing floor, with severed limbs and ripped out organs littering the pews and the floor. I broke the rest of the window away and climbed into the church, scanning for my daughter, but not seeing her among the murdered or the survivors.

As I approached the nearest survivor, an elderly man hogtied between two eviscerated bodies, I peered around the dim church, seeing that the cross on the wall above the stage had been turned upside down, with a man nailed to it. The late, middle-aged man on the cross wore jeans and a short-sleeved navy blue shirt, but he had a priest's collar at his neck. He was clearly dead, mutilated much as Seth had been.

"Rejoice in eternal darkness" was written in blood above the upside-down man. The same phrase I'd seen in the house with the dead couple. I turned back to the survivor, the elderly man begging for help through his gag. To loosen the sock shoved in his mouth, I had to cut the zip tie that had been used to fasten it there. Once it was out, the man said, "Get me out of here! They'll be back any minute!"

"They? How many are there?" "Two of them. But we didn't know. I swear, we didn't know." There was a scuffing sound, like a boot scraping the floor. The hairs on my neck stood on end. "Please!" The voice came from behind me, from near the stage, and it was sickeningly familiar. I stood up slowly, knees cracking and back screaming. Then I turned around and saw two people standing in an open doorway to the right of the stage.

No, only one of them was standing. I couldn't see him well enough because he had the other person in front of him. It took me a few long moments to sort through what I was seeing. I didn't want to believe it. My mind revolted at the reality of it. The man standing was wearing the other person. A woman, like a shield. Her legs and arms had been removed, hacked off, and inexpertly bandaged.

She had leather straps fixed at the nubs of her arms and legs, and the man was wearing her on his chest like a fucking backpack. Finally, I looked into the woman's face, trying not to pay attention to the man wearing the strange mask peering around her. "Mindy?" I asked, barely above a whisper. "Daddy, throw the guns out," the man said, holding a huge hunting knife to Mindy's throat. His voice was like crumbling stone.

He was a big man, wearing jeans, no shoes, no shirt, and a black goalie mask with screws poking out through the hard plastic. I assume they were to prevent Mindy from slamming her head back into him, but it made him look like a mixture of Pinhead and Jason Voorhees. It felt as though someone jammed a running weed eater into my stomach. My baby. Her arms and legs were gone. She looked awful, on the verge of death.

But she stared at me, asking me to save her with her eyes. "Throw the fucking guns out!" I immediately knew what I had to do. I had to get him to take me. To let Mindy live. It was the only thing to do. I threw the guns out the broken window and awaited further instructions. The man pointed with his knife at the old man whose gag I cut off. "Now cut him loose." I narrowed my eyes in confusion. "What?"

"Cut him loose!" "Okay!" I finished cutting the man loose. He stood up beside me, looking as uneasy as I felt. "Now give him your knife," the man in the mask said. Unsure what this was all about, but unwilling to test his resolve, I handed my combat knife to the old man, who took it with a grim expression. Now, the masked man turned his attention to the old man next to me. "Mr. Sheldon, is it?"

"Kill him, and you can go free." Sheldon and I locked eyes. My peripheral awareness told me that the masked man was moving toward us, but all my attention was on Sheldon and the knife I'd just given him. The old man swallowed, then his face grew still. "No, I won't." I turned my head to see the masked man's response to this defiance.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sheldon move quickly. My reflexes weren't totally gone, and I managed to jerk away, but not quite fast enough. The knife plunged halfway into my abdomen just above my left hip. Sheldon yanked it out and came at me again, swiping the knife at my neck.

I caught it and redirected the blade while disarming the old man. His wrist snapped like a rotten branch, and I sliced the knife across his forehead, sending blood flowing down into his eyes. He cried out and fell between two pews. "Dad!" I turned at my daughter's voice and saw them barreling toward me. Mindy had always been petite, and without her arms and legs, I figured she weighed maybe 70 pounds, allowing the large man to move quickly even with her strapped to him.

I dodged back as he swiped at me with his knife, tripping over one of many dead bodies in the church. I hit the floor, and the man threw himself on top of me. Too afraid of stabbing my daughter, I did nothing but put my left hand up, which was still badly bleeding. I accidentally jammed it into my daughter's throat in an effort to keep them off me. I pulled it away, letting their combined weight settle on me. I felt the man's left hand clamp around my right wrist.

Then I felt his knife blade slide between my ribs. The cold metal seemed to sizzle through my flesh. My left lung convulsed and spasmed as the blade pierced it. I looked up into my daughter's face, feeling her tears drip onto my cheeks. For a moment, it was like we were hugging. I wanted to tell her I loved her, but I couldn't speak. Back behind her head, the man grinned through his mask as he pulled his blade out of me in preparation for sending it back in.

I ignored him, fixing my gaze back on Mindy, trying to say the words "I love you" and "I'm sorry." But as soon as I looked into Mindy's face again, I saw something there. Her soft features had gone suddenly hard, lips sneering in a grimace, teeth clamped together. Before I could say a syllable, she slammed her head backward, right into the sharp screws protruding from the man's mask. Then she did it again, screaming through her teeth.

While it clearly wasn't enough to hurt the man much, it was enough to get him to back off a little, instinctively pulling away even though he pulled Mindy with him. I thought of Seth, Rico, and Saul, about how I'd failed them, and how I wasn't about to fail my daughter too. Especially after what she'd just done for me. Rallying what strength I had left, I yanked my knife arm from the man's momentarily slackened grasp and stabbed him in the armpit.

As he pulled himself away from me, blood pouring from his armpit, Mindy slammed her head back one more time. This time, she did it so hard her head stuck on the screws, partially obscuring the man's view. As he tried to get to his feet, I scrambled to my knees and thrust my knife between his legs, causing a scream to rip from his throat as I skewered his genitals. He still had his knife, and he thrust it wildly, stabbing me just below my left collarbone.

I stumbled away, his knife still sticking out of me. It was hard to breathe. My head swam, vision blurring and pulsing. I tried to focus on the man. He stumbled among the bodies, his entire left side covered in blood. I'd hit the axillary artery. He reached up and grabbed my daughter's head in both hands and yanked her skull off the screws in his mask. The action seemed to be too much for him.

He stood there, swaying for a moment before collapsing onto his back. I looked down at myself, at the knife sticking out of my chest and the blood pouring from my own wounds. I took a step toward my daughter and then collapsed onto all fours. Sudden movement from nearby startled me, but I couldn't do anything about it. Sheldon appeared by my side, holding his gag to his forehead to soak up the blood. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have done that. Help me."

"Get me to my daughter. Yeah, yeah, okay." Using his one good arm, he helped me to my feet, and we started the treacherous journey over to where my daughter lay on top of the killer. "We didn't know," Sheldon said. "We had no idea, I swear. Didn't know what? About the Sapp brothers. We didn't know he had them in the church basement all this time. We couldn't have known. Is that who did this?"

The Sapp brothers? Is that who he is? They went missing when they were just kids, 20 years ago now. Never found them. We had no way to know they were under the church the whole time, living down there like prisoners. Father Murdock, he never seemed… he always seemed like a good man to us. Father? I was unable to truly process what he was telling me. We got to Mindy, and I looked down at her. Her eyes were still open, but unmoving.

Then, they flicked to me. "Help me to my knees," I told Sheldon. Sheldon eased me down so I was on my knees, straddling one of the killer's legs. I reached out and undid the straps around what was left of my daughter's arms and legs. Then I reached down and, using all my reserves, I pulled Mindy off of the killer. It was too much, and I fell backward. But I kept hold of Mindy as I did.

I hugged her tight as I lay on my back, listening to her ragged breathing. Sheldon collapsed nearby, sobbing and repeatedly saying, "We didn't know." I ignored him, hugging my daughter one last time. With my last breath, I whispered into her ear, "I love you." I wanted to stay awake, wanted to know if she was going to make it. I didn't think she would, and maybe that was all for the better. But right before I slipped away,

I heard her voice in my ear. "I love you, Daddy."