Stolen Prophet: A Horror Supernatural Thriller (The Prophet's Mother Book 1)

by Julian M. Coleman

  The music stopped but Bertha kept shaking.

  David was defeated. He couldn’t take in one more strange thing. Bertha moved toward him, her lights turned into high beams and forced David to raise his hands against the glare.

  “What the…?”

  Snow melted on his face as he shook, but not from the cold. His truck rolled a few feet and then rose up as if on a car lift. Within seconds the tires were skimming the snow, as it continued its upward climb. All at once he was surrounded by a strong aroma of lavender.

  “Leave me alone!”

  He understood now. Those fools got out of their vehicles just as he had. It had been a ruse.

  A search.

  He heard, or felt a woman’s voice. He looked around and saw nothing. Bertha halted in midair. He stared at the underbelly of his beloved and heard himself beg, “What are you searching for? Maybe I can help you? Just don’t crush my wheels. I’ve got to get home to my wife and kids, please!”

  Don’t you know?

  He knew. Right through his body and down into his soul. The lavender scent became sickly sweet. He was too tired to gag. He imagined how some poor schmuck would find his crushed truck sitting on the top of the pile. He would have to trek through the woods. It was clear that nobody was supposed to leave the city.

  David faced a swirl of emotions, anger, frustration, and fear. He needed to get on the other side of that steel wall. “Did you hear me? Just let me go home!”

  The word home felt tender and right in his chest. He was freezing to death and he’d give anything to have his beautiful Gina kiss his face just once more time.

  Kenny Rodgers blared from the cracked speakers when the truck floated down. For a moment, David was blessedly snared by the headlights as Bertha eased onto the ground.

  The passenger side door opened with a groan that sounded much too human and guttural. David had to bite down on a scream as something black slithered out of the cab. Perhaps it was the brightness of the headlights, or his growing delirium, but he couldn’t make out any real definition. He thought he was staring at a shadow. There wasn’t a face, or facial features, except for the eyes which weren’t human. It was like staring into a furnace.

  The woman’s voice in his head. Did you see him?

  David was enveloped in debilitating emotions, but mostly he felt a terror that didn’t belong to him. It was fresh, thick and uncut. His own fear was dwarfed by the newly assumed heartbreak.

  He rapidly blinked against images that sped through his mind.

  He wasn’t David anymore. He was a woman who was thinking and feeling and loving a kid who wasn’t his, but at the same time Victor was his son. Oh sweet Jesus, he was missing! How did she let him get taken? The not knowing where Victor was or what had happened to him was unbearable.

  Her pain was terrific. David groaned and grabbed at his heart. He wanted her to stop sharing, but she wouldn’t or couldn’t. Her whispers filled him up with her grief. Her mourning was like a drip-drip of acid that ate through his heart.

  She asked her question again, Did you see him?

  Apparently David didn’t react quickly enough because he sensed her burrowing deeper into his mind. They swapped memories and identities. He felt that she had to be a ghost, or something omnipotent. He felt that she knew things about him that even Gina didn’t know. He tried to stop her from peeling back his psyche, but she was too strong. Finally, after seconds that extended into a brief infinity, she backed off.

  Her grief was uncontainable. He couldn’t believe that he could feel her sobs in his chest. He found his voice, “I wish I could help you. You know that, but I haven’t seen him. You didn’t need to do that to me.”

  Be on your way. There was a moment of hesitation, then he heard or felt, Family is important. If you can do the same job in Norfolk, then do so. Be accessible, be loving, and be there.

  He said, “Okay.”

  He was immediately fed new images, but they were of his family, his life with the girls and his before life with Gina when they used to laugh together. The pictorial dump was so intense that his head ballooned with pain.

  He emerged from the information assault physically rejuvenated, but emotionally beaten. Somehow he was warm, dry and sitting in his truck. The swishing wiper blades and a groovy tune from Eddie Rabbit filled in the numbing silence.

  Just as he was getting comfortable in the belief he’d pulled off on the side of the road and had had a nightmare, the intervals where the wiper blades cleared the windshield showed just how close he was to the debris wall. It still looked like a silent monster.

  Victor was gone.

  The pain drilled his heart. He fought to keep from sobbing.

  David didn’t need to look around to see that she was gone. He didn’t feel her presence anywhere. She had left him a gift, though. Bertha’s headlights zeroed in on an opening in the wall. It was large enough to edge his Chevy through.

  Freedom? David thought that he should’ve felt joy, but he didn’t. He was terrified to leave with Victor still missing. He had to do something to find…his son?

  He cleaned his face with his coat sleeve and contemplated his next moves. He was torn as he stared at the opening. He knew that she wanted him to go, that it wasn’t his fight.

  Go home.

  Her voice felt faint as if from another universe. He started tearing up again like some weak knucklehead, like he didn’t have a macho bone in his body. He sighed regretfully and shifted Bertha into gear and crept forward.

  He half expected the beast to close in on them, to crush him into the upholstery as Johnny Cash belted out, Hurt. He held his breath as they rolled through the wrecks and it was like emerging through a cave until they arrived on the other side…of the world it seemed.

  The contrast was stark.

  It hadn’t been a grand scale lie. David saw strangeness in his rear view mirror and turned to see it actually happening. The opening uncrumpled and merged as soon as Bertha’s rear bumper made it out. The wall had resealed itself.

  “Jesus!”

  David would think he was seeing things again if it weren’t for the shocked faces that surrounded his truck. The folks seemed frozen in their amazement. He would’ve told them they ain’t seen shit, if he’d thought to speak.

  He’d rolled out of a frozen hell and into a warm December night. Many lights shone on the wall, and a bevy of firetrucks and police cars blocked the lanes. He saw men with blowtorches and pick axes and brave souls or fools who were trying to scale, but inexplicably were falling down. He looked up to see helicopters trying an over-the-air scope, but he didn’t see them advance forward.

  Someone rapped on his window. A policeman ordered him to roll it down while another beamed his flashlight inside his car. He handed over his license and registration, answered some questions and given their demeanor he expected to blow into a breathalyzer.

  He stepped out of the car, as directed. Men in black overcoats and no nonsense attitudes grilled him with increasingly difficult questions. He couldn’t tell them the complete truth and since he was a bad liar, he knew they were suspicious.

  Eventually he was released. Truthfully, David couldn’t think about anything except going home. He knew that as soon as he crossed the threshold, his daughters would charge him and wrap around his legs like pipe cleaners. He also knew that Gina was ready for him too. She was going to open up a fresh bottle of It’s-about-time-your-ass-got-home whine.

  But tonight was going to be different. Instead of bitching back, he was going to hustle his daughters to bed and kiss their little noses and tell them he loved them so much. He was going to tell Gina that he would find a local job and help her out with the girls. Then, when he was sure the girls were asleep, he was going to ride his wife like a jockey on a thoroughbred.

  After all, he really was a lucky man.

  Chapter 9 – Broken Memories from the Asexual

  Harry chastised himself when he burst into the safe familiarity of the Homicide divisi
on. He was angry that he’d let a bunch of caged up perps stomp on his psyche? Maybe his newly found low threshold had to do with the citywide inertia caused by the blizzard. He didn’t know, but he couldn’t lose it because of some twinges of agoraphobia.

  He wove through dense humanity to park at his desk. He was caught off guard by the noise and congestion. Mason, whose desk front abutted his, glared at his computer screen.

  Harry whistled under his breath as he surveyed the chaos. “What the hell is going on?”

  His partner shrugged without taking his eyes off his task. “Damned if I know.”

  Harry locked his gun and walkie-talkie in his desk drawer before he first grabbed and then examined his coffee mug. The cup was clean enough. He zagged through the maze of people to help himself to the coffee and fixings. Once he was back at his desk, he took a couple of sips, grimaced at the burnt aftertaste, and returned his attention to his partner who seemed as animated as he had been in the alley.

  Harry figured that now was as good a time. He asked, “What was going on with you and Mr. Bryant?”

  “Nothing.”

  His response was short and sweet and full of bullshit. Mason had been his partner for a decade. Harry was godfather to both his girls. He knew when Mason was lying before he actually lied. And Mason was lying now.

  Harry decided to try a clearer tact. “Why were you guys staring at the wall?”

  Mason pecked the keyboard with his index fingers. “Don’t know what you’re talking about. I just want to get this report started.”

  Harry couldn’t let it go. “When I dropped him off just now, Mr. Bryant wanted to know if she was going to let him go or if she was still going to hurt him. Do you know who she is?”

  Mason looked up then. His eyes were vacant. He leaned in and whispered, “I told you that I didn’t see anything. He’d been running like he was hopped up on speed and then he just stopped. I mean that joker was just standing there. I tried to see what he was staring at…and you know what I saw? Nothing. I mean, what did you see?”

  Harry shrugged. “Seriously man? I didn’t see anything.”

  Mason lifted one corner of his lips into a lazy smile. “Right, Detective. Mr. One Hundred Percent closure rate. Don’t you get it? That guy was on drugs. There wasn’t nothing to see.”

  Harry asked, “You sure about that?”

  Mason dropped his smile and returned to his computer. “Why are you so sure there was something? That’s what I want to know.”

  Harry decided not to keep pushing. He would wait, but the topic would definitely resurface. He sipped his coffee as he scanned the room. The folks moping around the division revved up his anxiety. “I’m feeling hinky about some of the goons around here. What the hell is going on?”

  Mason said, “Oh that’s right, you were down in the cave with our perp listening to his Pity Me serenade. I hear there are cold cases popping up like zits on a greasy teenager. You know what that mean? I heard the lieutenant was considering calling for a full boat. No sick, no vacation time for anybody. Right in the middle of all that shit, Team B got saddled with a missing kid case.”

  He shot Harry a warning look. “Don’t lose it. The kid case ain’t ours and we don’t need it. I just told you the lieutenant put her B-team on it. They might not be much to look at, but they can find the kid.”

  Harry sank in his chair immersed within a tsunami of bad emotions. The last missing kid case had cost him time in the street and a black mark on his record. Not that he cared about his reputation. If given the same circumstances, he would gladly beat the crap out of that monster all over again except that this time no one would’ve been able to stop him.

  He sipped coffee, wished it was bourbon, and then he consulted his watch. It was almost the end of their shift. He needed to get started on his report.

  “I’ve checked out some of the names old Jerome gave us.”

  Harry had been so deep in thought that he nearly jumped. He grinned sheepishly. “I’d zoned out. What about those names? Real people?”

  Mason settled back in his chair as he ran his hands through his hair. He said, “Oh yeah, they were real people and now they’re real dead. I think Jerome was confessing truthfully. We got to get him in interrogation and track down some collaborating evidence while he’s in a singing mood.”

  Mason got up with his new mission. Harry couldn’t help his wild thoughts on such a cracked day. He suspected that finding free interrogation rooms would pose a problem. Right now Richmond seemed tilted toward crazy.

  He propped his feet on the edge of his desk. His thoughts wandered.

  He was an Army veteran who relished his righteous reputation as a closer. The department bigots had tagged him Charlie Chan despite his Japanese heritage. In fact, some of the other Cro-Magnons hung him, so to speak, with the wussy nickname, Captain Eunuch.

  Harry bristled at the moniker. How his lack of a sex drive became internal knowledge, Harry would love to know, but nonetheless his missing libido was too true a fact. Maybe he’d given off a vibe by turning down too many invites to hang out. Or maybe it was obvious that he didn’t have a woman, or man, in his life. It could’ve been because of the way he buried himself in the job. Any one of those flaws boiled over into a steamy pile of career jealousy and voila, he was minimized into a caricature, the weirdly efficient, but generally pathetic, Captain Eunuch.

  He hadn’t always been that way.

  He remembered how he used to love to indulge in raw sex. A lot. Now he waxed nostalgic, but not his Johnson, whenever he recalled losing his virginity in the bathroom of a dirty foster home with Georgette. She’d been a pretty sixteen-year-old with lowly aspirations of stripping. He could still taste her musty-sweatiness and reminisce on how their flesh-pounding interlude had led to his abrupt detour from total self-gratification.

  A few years later, as an enlisted private, he had lustily sampled exotic pussies as if that had been his true Army mission. He was handsome and he knew it. His jet-black hair had been mangled into a regulation crew-cut which accentuated his square jawline. He possessed thick eyebrows and piercing eyes which gave his handsome face depth and an additional layer of machismo. Back then he had been a real hedonist who had worked out until he was well-toned.

  He used to brag that he could get the ladies to disrobe for him just by looking at them. He had that Master of the Universe swagger and attitude that allowed him to hunt in the seediest districts with a near wanton disregard for his well-being. The more dangerous the locale, or woman, the spicier the sex.

  But he never paid for it. He had been a handsome soldier of Japanese descent who banked on his sex appeal. The ladies who commented on his green eyes were the easiest to bed. As soon as they remarked about his eyes, or said that his eyes looked like emeralds, it was only minutes before they disrobed.

  Now he was Captain Eunuch? The damned car accident nearly took his life. Sometimes he wished the smash-up had done just that, but he had survived. How long had that head-on occurred? Ten years ago? Seemed a lot longer.

  When Harry had resurfaced from his coma, he couldn’t remember a chunk of time, a whole year, in fact. As far as Harry knew, he had also lost a part of his soul. He just hadn’t felt like himself. Even his former police partner, Marshall, had shut him out by claiming that maybe he’d come back all wrong.

  Maybe?

  All Harry knew was that whenever he tried to call up the missing year it was like swimming through a swampy greyness, which was baffling. His life had changed a lot during that single year. Apparently he had been promoted, partnered up with Mason, and moved into a swanky apartment.

  The beat cop who used to hang out with his police buds at bars, who had hunted, and then bedded, the less than exotic pussies in Richmond, and who lived in a less than affluent section of the city, apparently had died in that wreck. In the end, the most important thing he’d lost was his desire to pile drive a hottie. God, he missed just wanting to do that.

  Harry took another swig of
cold coffee. He tapped on the keyboard and pulled up the photo of a young kid, possibly eight or nine, wearing a white knit polo shirt and a big grin, which caused Harry’s temples to throb. He settled his cup on the blotter so that he could rub just below his receding hairline.

  Mason returned and plopped in his chair. “You alright?”

  Harry nodded. “Yep, we ready?”

  Mason shook his head. “Hell, n’all! Look around. I couldn’t get near any of those rooms. We can bring him up here, but I want to get that little serial killing fucker on video.”

  Harry did look around. Had he fallen asleep at his desk? The squad room was still bustling with folks, but now, like the perps locked up in the cave, it was eerily quiet. “What’s going on?”

  Mason said, with a tinge of hostility, “The way I heard it, when it started to snow the city busted a crazy nut and jizzed a conscience on anyone who’d ever gotten away with a felony. I mean people are confessing to crimes they did yesterday or yesteryear, just like our wall-staring Jerome.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Don’t know, but I heard the other precincts are getting the same high tide of confessions. Yeah, we thought Jerome was strange for popping, but he ain’t the only one.”

  Harry stared at Mason. “Yeah, well he was scared that’s why he popped.”

  “If you say so.” Mason turned back to his computer. “In a few minutes, I’m busting out of here. You with me? I want to get my ass into bed. I’m not feeling one hundred percent.”

  Although Harry was in a dark mood, he decided to let Mason’s deception ride. He had other matters to consider like man’s perpetual inhumanity to self. That one bit of reality always chipped at his heart.

  As he contemplated a lifetime of examining the aftermath of murder, including his mom’s, Harry realized that he wasn’t just burnt out. His soul was turning to ashes. There wasn’t anything endearing about his profession, not anymore. He hadn’t been able to save her and he hadn’t been able to save…