CHAPTER 2
Dumped Into the Devil Zone
The young woman carried a backpack as she trudged along a snowy road that wound through a thick forest of evergreens, their boughs drooping under heavy winter loads. The road showed only animal tracks. No vehicles had passed this way in a long time. As her boots crunched through the ice and snow, Peggy Atkins wondered if she had been there previously, before the midday storm had covered her tracks. All around, she heard the eerie snapping of branches as they finally gave way under the weight of snow.
For days she had been wandering along narrow highways and logging roads, unable to get her bearings because the daytime sky was always gray, with no glimmer of sunshine. She could not think of a worse place to be, and sometimes felt herself wishing it would all be over soon, and that she could just lie down in the snow and go to sleep. She would do exactly that, too, if not for the unborn child in her womb.
Peggy shivered and gathered her coat collar tightly around her neck, re-buttoning the top snap that kept coming undone. Her blue eyes stared dully down, at her footfall. She wondered if she would ever bathe again, ever have her black hair clean and shiny, the way it used to be. How long had it been since she had even looked in a mirror at her reflection, since she had leisurely brushed her hair? The simple pleasures seemed so important to her now, and so irretrievable. Placing one foot in front of the other, she kept going, trudging along, her muscles aching for the relief she couldn’t give them.
Her old life was gone, and she hardly wanted to think about it, how things had gone so horribly wrong between her and her lover, and he’d hired someone to kill her—a plot that she foiled, fleeing for her life and the life of her unborn child.
The night before, Peggy had slept inside a crude lean-to that she had fashioned from sticks and fallen cedar boughs, but when nightfall arrived in a couple of hours, she had no idea where she would find shelter, if at all. She knew only one thing, that she should not remain in one place for any longer than necessary. She had to keep looking, trying to find a way out of this hellish wilderness. The crazy men who had driven her out there and dumped her had called it the “Devil Zone,” a place where sinners entered, but did not leave.
During her stay in the town, when it had still been a sanctuary for her, she’d heard of the zone, before it had become her sentence. An old man at the general store had compared it with the Bermuda Triangle, except on a smaller scale, a place where people disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
She didn’t see how everything had gone so bad for her. At first, the people of the mountain town had welcomed her, taking her into their homes and inviting her to share their sparse meals with them. Soon, she began to see that they had strict religious views, but this didn’t particularly alarm her. These days, a lot of religious communes had sprung up in remote regions, and she was sure that most of their members were good-hearted people.
Suspecting her situation as an unwed mother might be a problem with some of these backwoods folks, Peggy had concealed her condition at first. But as months passed and she began to show, she’d finally confided in a woman who had provided her with a room, telling her that the father had refused to marry her … and about the money and power he had, the way he wanted her dead and had the means to accomplish it.
Within hours, the story spread through town like a sudden storm and she began to notice hard, accusatory stares from people who had been pleasant to her previously, and mutterings that soon escalated to outright condemnation. A child out of wedlock! That was all they thought about, all they focused on. No sympathy for her at all, only blame. She must have brought it on herself, they said, she must be lying about him.
At the clapboard church, the minister, a cultist who called himself “The Faithfinder,” condemned her as a fallen woman and a symbol of everything that had gone wrong in the world. A wild-eyed man with a straggly beard, he held a town meeting one evening and said, “Untamed thou art in our midst, a wild and uncultured thing. Go, ye, harlot. We banish you to the Devil Zone where you can fornicate and be bestial, out of our sight.”
“But—but—I—I will be lost out there and—and—” In the front row of the church, tears streamed down Peggy’s face and she sobbed, “Why, why if the father refused to marry me and did all the rest—why am I considered fallen? What about him?”
“Enough,” thundered The Faithfinder. “Enough of your sniveling excuses, trying to weaken our resolve and make us think you are still pure and only a victim. Enough, Daughter of Eve, for you must have enticed the man, causing him to go astray.”
“No! It wasn’t like that!” She rose to her feet in indignation.
“Silence!” he shouted.
“But my baby!”
“You should have thought of that months ago,” the minister said.
As she sputtered protests, the minister and two deacons forced her into an off-road vehicle and blindfolded her. In the middle of the night, they drove her to a wilderness area and dumped her out into the snow beside a logging road, throwing a heavy parka, a flashlight, and a pack of supplies after her.
The Faithfinder had shouted at her, “If God wants you to survive, if thou art truly a chaste woman in heart, you will survive.” He and his companions then drove off, leaving her in the forest, dimly illuminated by a rarely-seen moon, piercing through the cloud cover.
Shaking with anger and shivering in the cold, Peggy had bundled up as much as possible and put the pack on. Then, saving the flashlight battery as much as possible, she had followed the tracks of the vehicle in the snow, thinking she might find her way back out—until a sudden snowfall hit.