by Glenn Ball
Then he took three pieces of rubber that looked like the souls of tennis shoes from a zippered pouch on the side of the backpack. Susanna tried to remember his having collected these items. It seems he had been busier than she had thought. Pushing the needles through the souls he made three bristly weapons that would likely go right through a shoe when stepped on, piercing the foot with agonizing pain.
“La ‘culebra’ venom very good weapon….” Taking the top off the Tupperware he took the rattlesnake head and placing its fangs over the rim began squeezing its venom into the empty Tupperware. “La ‘culebra’…how you say…rattlesnake…make much venom.” He kept squeezing, and the venom kept coming. Susanna was surprised how much that little head could contain. “Enough we can use many times. There, I think this enough.” He lifted the head before all the venom was squeezed out.
Holding one of the bristly souls he dipped the needles into the puddle of venom inside the Tupperware. Then he buried it to one side of the entrance with the needles protruding. Placing some rocks around it he made it so that they would not accidently step on it. “They come we move rocks; stand here.” He stood to one side of the entrance beyond the protruding needles to indicate his plan. “We leave, we move rocks.”
She nodded with admiration and approval. He prepared and laid out the other two in much the same way while she put the finishing touches on their breakfast.
Then he took the hammock and fastened several parts of it to small shrubs that grew in the ceiling and walls around the entryway. By doing so he arranged it so that they could pull it down on any intruder with a single yank. By entangling an intruder, it might give them the edge in defending themselves or buy time to escape.
Last of all he placed some of the hot rocks where any feet coming toward them would be directed into the poisoned needles.
That looks good. Let’s eat. They sat down to eat their fish. Aside from a few bites of rabbit stew the rabbit they grilled for snack bites while travelling.
The food and tea were invigorating. They savored every morsel not knowing when they would have the fortune to have another such opportunity to have food and a fire. The popping of the fire cheered their minds while the flames warmed their bones. All seemed deceivingly peaceful.
Pedro’s eyes suddenly looked at hers in alarm. For a moment she did not understand why. Then she felt it; like a tremor it vibrated in her bones. After another moment the vibration tickled her ears as well. It was rapidly growing louder, deafening, crashing into their silent world with crushing significance. It was a helicopter.
CHAPTER 31
Epiphany
Alicia sat in a pew contemplating all that had taken place. The whispers echoing off the vaulted ceiling magnified the silence in the church. It was a somber atmosphere that made her acutely self-aware. Though she still had the blanket wrapped around her she could not forget her near-nakedness underneath it and all that it had meant toward degrading her.
There was a sobering chill in the air. As much as Alicia tried to ignore the whispers, she couldn’t. They were probably merely people reciting the rosary, but they gave her the unnerving impression that people were staring at her, that they were murmuring about her.
A man hidden in the shadows of one of the pillars behind her was eyeing her intently, though she could not see him. His deep-set black eyes were locked on her as if she were the only important item in the chapel.
Whenever Alicia glanced around in her uneasiness, she was unable to spot the man in the shadows. He was well positioned to avoid detection. Her eyes did come across the eyes of others that seemed fixed on her; they were ornate statues of saints dispersed along the length of the walls. They seemed to be peering around the massive columns that were situated along the outer rows of the hard, wooden pews. She felt like a defendant on trial in the middle of a huge courthouse.
There it was, deep in the background, hidden in the shadows where it always seemed to lurk. It was her judgement. The saints seemed as if they were comparing their perfect lives to her mal-adjusted comportment. Maybe they were judging whether she was worthy of remaining in the church and receiving their help.
She knew she wasn’t. From the time she was little she had been told in no uncertain terms that she was a monster—a prostitute destined to pervert the lives of men. Every encounter of her life had validated that assessment of her. Every encounter except….
She began to sob as she thought of Artie. Weary with grief and severe physical exhaustion, she melted off the cushioned pew onto a kneeler at her feet. Even in her attempt at kneeling to pray she could not keep herself upright. She slumped; her head bowed, touching the pew in front of her.
The man in the shadows craned his neck. All but the top of her head had disappeared from his view. The whites of his eyes shone more as they strained in their increased vigilance of Alicia.
She dared not break the silence with her words. They remained rather in her head, voiced within the privacy of her communion with a God who alone could hear her. “Help me God! I’ve done so much wrong! Save me from the men who want to kill me! Save me from the wrong! Save me from me!”
Through the slits in her eyes she could see the teardrops falling onto the red carpet-covered kneeler and visions of the blood oozing from Artie flooded her mind. Grief overwhelmed her.
Shame had a thousand faces: men she had been obligated to please at the expense of her womanhood. “His death was your fault.” Like the witch of her childhood their fingers pointed accusingly at her. “You’re nothing but a worthless slut. It was your fault Artie died. If he hadn’t tried in vain to save you from your wretchedness, he would still be alive.”
In her distress she looked up and the grotesque figure of Christ in anguish on the cross caught her attention. Underneath the larger-than-life crucifix was the carving of a passage from Isaiah 53: “But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.” It was her sins that had caused his torture; it had been due to her that even the Christ Himself had suffered and died. She was The Cause. Grief overwhelmed her.
********
Jorge Sandoval stuffed his mouth with another bite of the pancake stack when his cell phone rang. Seeing who it was he answered quickly, grunting the semblance of a greeting through the pancakes.
It was Lieutenant Joseph Sanchez, his man on the force in charge of the dragnet for Alicia Espinosa. Familiar with the grunt Joseph immediately began giving an account of their progress on the Alicia case. They had just had a major breakthrough.
Sandoval motioned with his hands for his men to keep the racket down. People from two other tables had stopped eating for a moment to stare at the noisemakers. It was bad enough that they were drawing unnecessary attention to him and his business, attention he definitely did not need; now they were interfering with him hearing a phone conversation of utmost importance.
Sanchez had been saying something about “just this morning….” The men finally quieted enough for him to hear. “We got a report of someone matching her description on Highway 190. The caller was concerned for her because it looked like she was being attacked and had been raped. She was wearing almost nothing and there had been a man chasing her that grabbed at her as she barely escaped in a passing car that had stopped to help.”
Jorge had finally finished his bite and interjected, “Yeah but how do you know it’s really her?” He took a small bite of his fried eggs as he listened to the response.
“That’s the best part. The witness was in a car following the one that picked her up and caught video footage of the incident and put it on his social media account. We were able to verify her description in the video and track the car by the license plate in the video. From that we caught a better shot of her with a traffic cam in Denham Springs confirming her identity.”
Sandoval wiped his mouth with a napkin. “That’s just the break we’ve been waiting for.” His tone was upbeat, thou
gh his sudden glare caught two of his men who were beginning to play fight, keeping them in check.
Sanchez went on. “That’s not all. By tracing the route of the car, we got another traffic cam shot of it and the driver a half hour later just before Florida Boulevard runs into Airline Highway.” Joseph took a deep breath. “Get this…she was no longer in the car. That’s a fifteen-minute drive on a five-mile stretch, so we know that he had to have detoured somewhere within those five miles and dropped her off somewhere. It has to be less than seven minutes from Florida Boulevard along that stretch. I’ve already dispatched my men to canvas the area.”
“Great work Sanchez.” As Jorge took a sip of coffee his eyes had a twinkle in them. “It shouldn’t be long before we have that b*tch where we want her. When she’s faced with a murder rap, she won’t have any choice but to do what we want.” His words chimed out softly in a sing-song tone that muffled his glee, so that none but Sanchez could make it out. “I’ll let Antonio know. He’ll be glad our arrangement is working out so well. Keep up the good work and you can be sure there will be plenty of reward for your effort.”
As Jorge picked up the tab for his crew, he found himself in a much better mood than when they had entered. On the way to the construction site on his most recent land development he would give Antonio a call.
********
Why had she been so enamored of Antonio for all those years? She had no answer for that question. She felt like the dregs of the earth, having slept with man after man to make him money. A slave, she had been at his beck and call to pleasure his every desire.
Visions of Antonio destroying lives arrested her thoughts. She could see her friends being tortured in his castle and hear their screams as if it were happening at that very moment. The smells of corpses being removed from his castle and the grotesque expressions on their faces plagued her memory making her shudder.
The brief tour he had given her of his giant warehouse with the state-of-the-art lab he was so proud of came back to her too, though she did not know why. She knew it was some kind of factory where he tested chemical weapons but had never understood what it was all about. But now she remembered that he had taken corpses from there too. At the time she had thought nothing of it, she had become so numbed to his evil it seemed normal to find corpses wherever he went. “You should have seen him squirming before he kneeled over and died.” He had been laughing as he recounted the awful event at his lab on his cell. It had something to do with the big event he was planning with some terrorist big shot from the other side of the world.
The terrorist…the lab…as the memories came back to her the realization of what Antonio was intending to do was slowly sinking in as the pieces came together. He had been sacrificing lives in chemical and biological experiments. His experiments…
Maybe she herself was nothing but a lab rat for him; a tool for him to carry out his evil schemes. Maybe that was why he had been interested in her exposure to the zika virus as a youngster; that must have been what all those tests on her and the blood samples had been about. It all had to do with some terrorist plot.
An even greater wave of grief engulfed her, suffocating her. How could he? As if it wasn’t enough that she had been the cause of Artie’s death, and her sins for the sake of Antonio had made her The Cause for even the Savior’s death…now she suspected that Antonio somehow planned to use her immunity to zika to turn her into a weapon of plague on the American people. How many thousands or even millions would suffer and die for the evil Antonio had planted inside of her? Had he indeed turned her into the very zika monster she feared all her life?
In her grief she actually passed out, falling to the floor.
Having completely lost sight of her the man in the shadows crept to a pillar near her row. There from yet another set of shadows he peeked around the edge of the pillar to capture her in his sights once again. The tension in his stance indicated he was both at the ready to make a dash toward her and yet debating whether it would be necessary.
********
The images whirled past her eyes in dreamlike incoherence. She was on a hospital gurney; she could feel the pin prick of a needle in her arm. Looking down at it she saw it was an IV; it was giving her life. As she looked harder the liquid in the tube became blood. Gradually it dawned on her, ever so slowly, that she was receiving a blood transfusion.
Following the tube with her eyes they landed upon her donor. It was a man with a severely swollen face, so swollen that it was hardly recognizable as a man’s face. His eyes were bursting as if with blood.
The thought startled her as if she had known it all along but had been unable to grasp its full meaning: he was a zika monster. All her zika-infected blood was pouring out of her and into him, transforming him into a monstrous unrecognizable blob even as she watched.
The words came from somewhere… she did not know where… “He became sin for us who knew no sin that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”
Like a procession of zika zombies she saw the faces of those who had violated her over the years. They seemed to be approaching her to eat her, but as each one would take a bite of her flesh, he would fall to the floor a harmless lump and her flesh would remain intact as if utterly untouched. She was immune to their zika plague.
The two men from earlier that day approached her, and they too fell to the floor helpless against her.
…Last of all came Antonio. He looked like the Sta. Muerte with a caped hood masking his face in darkness. He always did love the darkness. She felt a chill as he approached her. Fear paralyzed her as the Lord of the Zika Zombies sunk his teeth into her blood. Penetrating pain stabbed her to her core, but only for a moment.
In the moments that followed the mouth that had bitten into her dissolved. In shock she watched as this Sta. Muerte, this Antonio Ochoa Machado who had created his own perverted zika monster army fall helpless, writhing on the ground. Even stranger the gaping wound his bite had caused instantly closed back up healed as if it had never happened.
She found her gaze locked on the tube through which blood was pouring into her. Now she understood. That blood contained The Cure. It was washing away all their zika zombie plague infection and infusing her with some type of supernatural purifying strength.
Turning her head to see the man that had turned into a zika zombie monster as her blood flowed into him, she saw the pain on his face; needles were being jabbed into his skull. She cringed to see that his arms were pinned to his gurney with oversized needles that looked like railroad spikes. He was so swollen with her bad blood that it began to ooze out of him.
She couldn’t understand her sadness when his head dropped. In her wooziness she tried to remember…did she know this man?
Again, words came out of nowhere. “Upon Him was laid the iniquity of us all.”
It was as if she was coming out of anesthesia, yet somehow, she was beginning to grasp that it was her fault he had died. Sadness overwhelmed her. She was shaking with grief.
Then as she watched him through her tears several strange things occurred: to her amazement all the blood fell from his body; immediately afterwards his body began to emit light. The man that had looked like a monster now looked like an angel.
He sat up. He had come to life again. That’s when she recognized the Giver of Life, the Savior.
She came to.
********
Antonio wasted no time. As he stepped off the plane and descended the mobile steps, he was calling Jorge to get an update. It had only been a few measly hours, yet as he waited through the empty rings on the other end, he hoped there would be some kind of breakthrough in the search for Alicia.
He could not wait to get his hands on her. Her role was too integral to his plans for her to be roaming loose. She had been part of his ground zero for the plague release and her knowledge of his terrorist contacts and biological weapons facility were too extensive to allow the risk of her alerting the authorities. Besides, he could not get o
ver the fact that his number one girl had gotten the best of him. She would definitely have to pay for her crime.
“Yeah Antonio, I have some good news!” Jorge’s first words electrified Ochoa Machado. He could feel Alicia’s neck in his grip.
The runway pavement felt like an oven cooking under his feet, its hard surface unyielding. Yet Antonio felt as if he were still walking on clouds.
“Besides her being within a seven-mile radius that they are now searching, they have undeniable proof of her guilt in the murder of the man you killed. Seems his dog stuck its nose in his blood, and her hair was found in that blood on the dog’s snout. All they have to do is match her DNA to the hair they found, and they have her dead to rights.”
“Serves her right, the little murderous b*tch…” Ochoa snickered, mocking the innocence of the one who had betrayed him. In his mind it was only fair that she should pay for his crime. After all, it was all because of her unfaithfulness to him that he had been forced to kill that old codger.
Antonio stepped into his limousine. “I knew I could count on you to get the job done Jorge. You were right about the money for your crooked cops. Keep up the good work. It’s going to pay off big for us all.”
After he hung up, Antonio’s mind was flooded with delicious images of the women he had tortured, women who also had been unfaithful to him. They had hung as helpless as Christ on the cross, naked humiliation and screams of agony that he could still hear and relish in the silent solitude of the limo.
It won’t be long now Alicia…your turn is coming.
********
Sitting up between two pews the words formed like the whisper of someone rising from his deathbed. “God, I don’t want to be a monster. I don’t want to destroy lives. I want to be like Artie and save them. I want to be like you.”
“You are my Precious Pearl!” She could still hear Artie’s voice telling her what God would say to her. “You are beautiful; you are pure; you are my ‘Precious Pearl’ bought at a great price.”