INDIE

I stand in front of the sign that reads St Andrew’s Catholic Church. My stomach roils. My hands shake. It’s a little past 7:00pm. It’s taken two days of waiting, of watching, and planning to get to this point. Biker puts his hand in mine. “It’s not too late to back out.”

“I know.”

“I take it that means you won’t.”

“No. I won’t.” I exhale, and I feel as if I can’t get enough oxygen into my lungs. “I may throw up all over my shoes, though.”

“Try not to. It’s evidence.”

“O–kay.” It frightens me how concerned he is with being invisible, though I guess when you spend your life killing, drugging and abducting people, that’s a given. My head swims a little at that thought. If he’d never left that tape behind, if he hadn’t needed me to find out who these men were, would he have let me go? Or would I still be locked in that room of his at the clubhouse? Would his brothers have killed me? Would he? “Let’s just get this over with.”

He squeezes my hand. My palm is clammy against his. We walk towards the doors, and I let him lead, mostly so my face is covered, but also because I don’t know if I can walk into a room housing that man.

The second I set foot in the church the walls close in on me. I feel the blackness, the horror, the shame, and the weight of what he did choking me. I can’t breathe. I wrench my arm from Kick’s, but he grabs me and shoves me into a pew at the back of the church.

The Priest seems completely unfazed. He continues with his sermon, and his voice presses against my skin like a thousand tiny needles. “It is because we are all sinners, that we must atone,” he says, and though it’s not said with the same intent or malice behind it as it was in that warehouse, I feel so much of what he did to me. My breath comes in raspy gulps, too fast, too much. I’m going to pass out and blow our cover. I’m going to ruin everything we’ve spent the last two days working toward. And I’m never going to have this chance again.

Biker leans closer. “You need to control yourself.”

I snap my head towards him, incredulous that he just said that to me. He takes my hand and squeezes it hard. “Remember why we’re here. Those things he did to you, to the other girls before you—all of that can end here. But you have to keep it together. He might not be able to hear you breathin’ like an emphysema patient, and he may not be able to see your knees knocking together, but that wig you’re wearing is shaking like a fucking leaf in a strong wind. So pull your shit together, and let’s put this bastard to ground.”

An elderly man about three rows ahead turns to shush us. Kick gives him an apologetic nod and straightens, yanking on his tie. If we weren’t here to kill a rapist I might be able to appreciate how incredible he looks, even if they are just basic dress clothes from Target. I’m wearing pants, a conservative button-up shirt, and heels, though I have no idea why I thought the heels were a good idea. I can barely walk as it is, much less try to balance on an extra three inches. Biker shaved his stubble for the occasion, and he looks young, so much younger than he does with it. He’s also incredibly beautiful. I mean, obviously, there was an attraction there, to begin with, but I never noticed before how gorgeous he is, even with the piercings, tattoos, and gauges in his ears. Looking at his face helps me ignore the scene around me; it helps me drown out the voice belonging to the man that tried to destroy me. Kick glances over. His gaze holds mine before turning back to the Priest.

I tear my gaze from biker and look at the Priest. He looks exactly the same, only when he had me locked in that room his eyes were black as the night outside, and now they’re almost jovial. The thing that surprises me most is how animated he is, how normal he seems in front of his congregation. And as I look around at the packed church, I see people of all ages and all walks of life who appear to love this sick, sadistic bastard. They know nothing of my suffering, of the suffering of the girls before me. I know Kick probably would have preferred I didn’t know that, but I heard everything his prez said.

I don’t know what he did to those tapes, or the pictures that I remembered them posing for—when I was out of my mind with grief and pain, they lined up, one after the other and posed with me like I was a fucking trophy, like a hunter would with a deer he’d shot or a large fish wriggling on a hook.

All of these people have no idea what their beloved pastor is capable of, and the worst part is they’ll never know, because exposing myself means exposing the murder I’m about to commit, and I’ll be damned if I spend any more time in captivity. I can’t let that happen. I won’t. So while what I’m about to do to the Priest is justice stripped down to its purest and rawest form, to the people sitting around us, this will be an atrocity. I almost feel bad for them that this charming, good-looking pastor has them so convinced he’s a person worth following.

I stare at him for a long time. He doesn’t look at me once throughout the service. I don’t know why, but a part of me wants them all to know. A part of me wants to stand up and call him out in front of his congregation when he begins talking about sinners again, and that line he used to whisper over and over in my ear as he raped me. I’m weightless. I stand, only to be pulled back down onto the church pew.

“Sit the fuck down, spitfire. You ruin this at the last minute, and you’ll hate yourself forever.”

He’s right. I hate that he’s right. I hate that he’s holding me back from exposing this sick bastard. I snatch my hand from his and remain in my seat, my head down, gaze averted. In my head I try to think of good memories from my past: summers at the beach house, fleeing the water as it swept up the sand after me. I think of my first kiss, the first time I got drunk at a high school party, receiving my acceptance letter to Sydney University, biker teaching me to fight, the power and pride I felt afterwards, Daniel inside me, his arms wrapped tight around my body as he tried to erase everything the Priest had done to me. Before long, though, the Priest’s voice cuts through those happy memories, and rattles around in my skull like my missing teeth in a jar. Rage rips through me from my head down to my toes.

The Priest finishes up his sermon, and a boy in robes carrying a processional cross leads him down the altar. I stare at the object, and I feel a sick sense of recollection. He raped me with it. A gasp leaves my mouth, and I cover it with my hands and suck in air, though I don’t feel it filling my lungs. I can’t do this. I can’t …

The sobs leave my mouth, creating some sort of wounded animal noise. I can feel the congregation’s eyes on me as they file out after the Priest, but I can do nothing to stop the sounds escaping my body. The fear and horror demands to be unleashed.

He didn’t even look at me as he passed.

“Is she all right, dear?” an elderly lady stops at the end of the pew, resting a hand on Kick’s shoulder.

“She lost her mum today. Needed to feel closer to God.”

“Oh, I am so sorry for your loss,” the woman says, and she’s genuinely upset for me. In some ways, her sympathy hurts worse. I don’t know her. I’ve never seen this woman before in my life, but the fact that she stopped enough to care for a complete stranger guts me, and I fall apart completely. “Did she suffer long?”

“Yes,” I manage through my sobs. “She suffered … in the worst way imaginable.”

The woman doesn’t know I’m referring to myself and not my own mother, though I’m sure as much as my parents led me to believe I was an inconvenience, that there was some part of them that cared I was missing. I’d like to believe that, and they certainly painted a good picture of grieving parents in the media, but that was likely more for show than genuine concern for me.

The woman pats my hand, but I yank it away. I can’t have anyone touch me right now. “God bless,” she says, and I don’t know if she’s talking to Kick or to me because I can’t look at her anymore. My eyes are tightly closed, my fists clenched.

“I have to go,” Kick whispers. I open my eyes to find he’s standing in the pew beside me and the church has emptied, save for us. He bites the piercing in his lip. His gaze locks onto mine, and I see so much buried there that he can’t say. He’s torn, and somehow so much older in this moment. He takes a deep breath and lets it out. “Everything you’re feeling right now, use it. Channel it into something useful because if you don’t, this opportunity escapes us forever, and I can’t live with that.”

Neither can I.

Without another word, he leaves through the main doors. The blade pressing into my lower back is cool against my fevered flesh. I take a minute to breathe, and then I remove my heels and my wig, and I unbutton my top and fold it, stowing my belongings under the seat, so I’m left in only my black singlet and pants.

And then I wait.

It feels like an eternity before the plump, sweaty altar boy comes striding back in, and the Priest follows. He doesn’t seem surprised when he sees his church is not empty. “You go on home, John. I’ll take that,” he says to his protégé, holding out his hand for the processional cross he raped me with. “Please tell your mother I said thank you for the biscotti.”

“Thank you, Father, I will. Good night,” John says and hurries out of the church. The Priest walks over and closes the doors, sliding the heavy wooden bar across them.

The sound is so final, so weighty that it’s deafening. I’m completely alone with my rapist. I try channelling my fear and rage into something useful like Kick told me, but honestly, I can’t make up from down. I don’t feel numb like I did before the Cop put his gun to my head. I feel everything.

“I knew you’d find me,” he says, sitting down in the pew beside me. “I’ve been waiting for you, Kayla.”

I cringe when I hear my name on his tongue. The whole time I was locked in the warehouse, I’d believed they had never known it. They’d certainly never used it; they referred to me only as the whore. I’d thought I was just some random girl they’d plucked from the streets, but now I realise just how dumb that was. They chose me because I looked like I belonged to somebody. Someone would report me missing, and they would know exactly where to go if I ever escaped. Had they done that with the other girls?

“The other’s failed God’s mission, but not me. I am his light, his beacon in the darkness of this hell we call earth, and I will not fail, because I shall be called into the arms of the Lord.” He leans towards me and his cologne—no, not cologne, it’s the scent of sandalwood and myrrh, the smell of this church—infiltrates my nose, it invades my mind, and memories rape me. The Priest places his big hand on my knee. I flinch.

“Shh, shh, shh, you serve a greater purpose than you know. You are the key to redemption, Kayla.”

“There is no redemption for you, you sick fuck,” I say and pull the knife from my back. I slash against the arm holding my leg. He gasps and yanks away, and then I’m racing down the aisle toward the altar. His robes whisper as he casually follows me.

“That’s something you don’t know about me, Kayla.” His booming voice fills the church. I feel it boring into my eardrums, scratching, clawing, and settling into my bones. “That I love to hunt. We never got the chance to play that game, you and I, but I think now is as good a time as any to begin. Don’t you?”

I run past the pulpit, past the altar, and reach the door on the right side of the room, but it’s locked. Panic seizes me as I realise I have the wrong door. I glance at the Priest, and then at the opposite side of the church, to the vestry.

He smiles. “Will you get there in time or won’t you, Whore?”

I bolt for the door, but only make it as far as the altar before he is on the other side, taunting me with which direction he’s going to move in. I knock over the goblet of wine and a handful of other sacred objects. The Priest sees red and lunges across the marble table at me. I sprint for the vestry, but he yanks me back by the hair and throws me on the ground, my head smacking against the marble steps of the altar. I scream as he bends over me. He works the knife from my hand, slamming my wrists repeatedly against the marble until I let go. He presses the blade to my throat. He can cut me, he can slice me open any way he wants to, but I know something he doesn’t.

“Time to meet your maker, motherfucker,” Kick says, cocking the pistol before he shoots him in the back of both knees. The Priest screams and drops to the ground beside me. Blood is everywhere, pooling out of his body as he trembles in shock. Kick offers me a hand, and I climb to my feet with his help. He pulls me against him with one arm, keeping the gun in the other hand firmly trained on the Priest’s head. “You okay?”

Of course, I’m not okay. I don’t know if I’ll ever be okay again.

“You’ll burn for this … the two of you will burn,” the Priest says.

“Shut the fuck up.” Kick fires another shot into the Priest’s shoulder. It’s fitted with a silencer, but guns are loud. The Priest’s screams are even louder. The church isn’t in a residential area, and that’s maybe the only reason we could pull this off, but I still cringe with the way the sound bounces all around the room with the acoustics.

“Hold the gun.” Biker hands me the gun, and I point it at the Priest. I still have no fucking idea how to use one of these, but I’ve seen Kick do it enough.

I just stare as Kick binds the Priest’s hands together, stuffing the tie in his mouth. He screams as we move him to the altar. If Kick had a stronger partner, it might’ve gone easier, but we both wind up covered in blood. Biker pulls the long stretch of rope from the garbage bags he brought in through the vestry. He ties him to the altar with a series of complicated knots. I don’t ask how he knows how to do that. I don’t want to know, not really.

 I stand beside the Priest’s head. The darkness in his eyes has returned, but there’s fear in there too. The human mind is such a fragile thing. We can feel so powerful one moment, and so small the next.

“All this time, I’d built you up in my head,” I say. “I’d see you in my dreams, hovering over me, pushing into me. I’d feel your sweat. I could feel how evil you were, and each time you came inside me I wanted to die.” I level my gaze on him, feeling the shift within me. The victim takes a back seat. He feels it too. I see it in his eyes.

“I don’t want that anymore. You’re just a man, and for the first time since you took me, I’m going to sleep soundly tonight, because I got to hear you scream. I’m not afraid of you anymore. I found something bigger than you.”

He laughs. It’s a fake and showy sound. “Your biker?”

“No. Me.”

“And there’s the girl we were trying to find.” He smiles. “There’s the woman worthy of being called the sacrifice. If we hadn’t found you, you’d have never found that. You should thank me.”

“Oh, I plan to. I plan to repay every single scream that left my mouth.”

Kick shoots me a look, questioning whether I want to go through with this. I’ve never been surer of anything in my life. I nod. He hands me his knife—not the tiny one I cut the priest with before, but the kind you know is really a knife, with a wicked blade, sturdy handle, and a deadly sharp point.

“How do you like hunting now, Father?” I ask, as I take the knife and thrust it into his abdomen. Blood spurts out and sprays my face, my hair, my body, but I don’t care. I drive it in to the hilt, relishing the way his body jerks, savouring the screams.

Kick just stares at me. It’s as though he’s drunk on euphoria, and then he closes the distance between us and I’m caught up in his arms, my face in his hands, and the barrel of the gun grazing my cheek as he holds it. He kisses me, full on the lips, and then he releases my face with a smile.

I can’t think about that right now, the fact that violence excites him. This isn’t about gutting a man for kicks. This is retribution.

I pick up one of the three cans of gasoline that Kick had brought in. I unscrew the cap and douse the Priest in it. He screams as it hits the wound in his belly. Kick takes the other two cans and begins splashing kerosene through the church, over the aisle, the pews, the statues, everything. When he’s done, he moves behind me and begins pouring the second can around the marble altar. It really is a beautiful cathedral, and once upon a time I may have been repulsed by the thought of anyone destroying such a sacred place, but this place isn’t sacred. It’s just a building, and it’s tainted with the evil of its priest. It’s no longer a place in which to worship God, it’s a place for him to be venerated, and I’ll be dead before I ever let that happen.

“I remember you used to go on and on about how you were born of fire when your father gave you that cross, when he burned your tiny little body with a cattle brand. It’s another thing I never stop seeing in my dreams, that scar on your back. But you should be careful what you reveal to people, Father.” I lean in and whisper, “Especially when it comes to your worst fears.”

His face slackens with horror and realisation. I smile and pull the matchbox from the pocket of my pants. “Are you ready to be born of fire again?”

“You can’t touch me … I am God’s servant, and you are the sacrifice. You cannot interfere with divine intervention.”

“There is no divine intervention, not for you—only death. You picked the wrong girl to sacrifice. I’m not a lamb you can lead to the slaughter, Father, I’m a motherfucking lioness.” I stand back and strike the match. It feels as if the world spins in slow motion as I throw that tiny flame on his body. The screams begin, and I close my eyes. The flames are bright behind my lids. I don’t need to see to savour this moment. I am this moment. And I’m glorious in my destruction.

Somewhere in the back of my brain I register Kick screaming at me to move, and his arms on me tugging me back from the pyre, but if he was drunk on euphoria after I stabbed the Priest, I’m drowning in it. I’m pulled back through the vestry, and my feet are burning, but I’m not as worried about that as I am that I won’t get to hear him scream.

Then I realise it’s not the Priest’s shouts of horror I’m hearing at all, but Kick’s. The Priest has already stopped moving, stopped breathing. He’s no longer there, and I’m no longer exultant in my revenge.

I’m shaking.

I’m broken.

I’m on fire.

Kick drags me through the vestry and out onto the grass behind the burning church, digging up the earth with his bare hands to douse the flames on my feet. The flames licking my pant legs have already gone out. I don’t tell him that, though. Instead, I bury my head in my hands and sob. I let go of everything the monster did to me, everything I remember about those hands and the delight in those eyes as he shoved himself inside me. I let go of me.

“We gotta move,” Kick says, crouching down beside me. “Can you walk?”

I nod and let him help me to my feet. They hurt, my burned flesh smarts, but it’s not the worst pain I’ve endured. I stare at the flames, and then Kick and I make our way towards the car parked across the street. He uses the fob to unlock it and climbs in the driver’s seat. I reach for the handle, but see my reflection in the passenger’s side window. I’m surrounded by flames. They lick against the night sky as the woman stares back at me. Her eyes are vacant, devoid of anything … soulless. Her face is covered in blood, her hair matted with sweat. I can’t be sure, but I imagine this was what I looked like when Kick found me, only then the blood covering my face was my own.

Kick gets out of the car and glares at me over the roof. “Hear those sirens, babe? That means the cops are coming. Get in the car.”

I glance at my reflection again. This woman isn’t me. I’m not a killer. I’m not a warrior, or a goddess resplendent in her havoc. I’m just a girl who did what I had to in order to sleep at night. I’m a monster. I’m exactly what they all made me. Even Kick.

“No.”

“Get in the fucking car, Indie.”

“Let me go, Daniel.” He’s on the other side of the vehicle, but I know he knows I’m not talking about him releasing me physically.

“Are you fucking crazy?”

“Maybe.” I shrug, staring at my reflection again. I feel like Alice through the looking glass, as if I’m staring at a different me in a different world, and wondering how I get back to my regular life. “What does it matter? I’m walking away, regardless.”

 “Get in the goddamn car before you get us both arrested.”

 “You promised when this was all over you would let me walk away.”

“Then I fuckin’ lied,” he snaps, coming around the side of the vehicle. He grabs the tops of my shoulders and shakes me hard. “You don’t get to walk away from this.”

“You can’t hold me, anymore, Daniel.” I push his hands away. “This is done. We’re done. I just want my life back.”

“So that’s it, huh? You just used me to get to your Priest, and that’s all I’m good for?”

“No. I used you to get strong.” I shake my head. Tears slide over my cheeks. I feel my body going through the motions, but I don’t feel anything. “And now I’m a damn iron pillar.”

I don’t wait for a response, I just turn away. I walk away from everything they made me. Everything I felt last night with Daniel inside me, everything I’ve felt for him since I learned he was only trying to help me, that he was seeking some sort of redemption. Since I realised that he was worthy of it.

I walk away, because I’m finally free.