Untaken

by Yul Calsto

  Jimmy nodded once more, but the boy looked confused. Emily put her hand on the boy’s head and ruffled his hair. “Jake, why are you asking?”

  “I’m just wondering if they were baptized. I’m wondering why they were not taken.”

  “And baptism would have solved that?”

  “I don’t know. Baptism washes away Original Sin.”

  “I was baptized. The priest was baptized,” Emily said.

  “I wasn’t. These children are so young.” Jake stood up. “There are more people out there. More children just like them.”

  The heavy rain stopped suddenly, but the purple light of the sky held. The church became muggy and humid almost instantly, as the raindrops were evaporating outside. Jake walked over to Brooks. The big man was kneeling in prayer. He seemed saintly under the purple light that beamed in through the windows. The stain glass seemed to have no effect on changing the color of the light. “Brooks. Will you go with me and gather more people?”

  Brooks stood up, “I’m with you. I’ll need a better weapon. A gun.”

  “Of course. And as much holy water as we can carry.” Jake shook the big man’s hand, and he asked him, “Brooks, were you baptized?”

  “Yes, I was. I was twenty-eight when I accepted God into my life.”

  Jake smiled at him.

  Armed with the priest’s revolver, Thomas’ Glock, and four of the bottled waters refilled with the blessed water from the church, they went out. Jake had the backpack with the extra .357 revolver rounds on his back. There was no hiding in the shadows this time. The purple sky had brightened and it left little shade for them to conceal their movements in. Despite the rain, the ground was still black from the dark red clouds that had swept across the earth. The pavement had the steam of vaporized water rising up.

  They started at the first house that they could see, just down the street from the church. After breaking through the locked door, they searched each room, quietly calling out for survivors. They had to be careful. Any survivors would be terrified of any kind of intrusion at this point. If they broke into a house and were met with an armed survivor, there would be very little trust between them.

  The air was silent. Each movement they made felt like it was magnified by one hundred times in the stillness.

  They continued on down the street, checking more houses. Some were messy inside with spilled blood. Some were covered in the black ash remains of the bodies of the damned who had been caught indoors. Most of the windows in the houses were shattered out. There were overturned cars and uprooted trees in some areas and in others there were nicely kept flower gardens that seemed to have not been disturbed at all.

  In the purple sky, there was a flash. It was not a lightning bolt, although it was quick like one. The entire sky lit up in a bright whiteness that momentarily blinded the two men as they ran from one house to another. The earth trembled again.

  Jake stopped in the grass in front of a house. He rubbed his eyes and squinted. The flash of light had seized his eyesight briefly and the brightness of the sky made it difficult to recover. He squinted his way onto the front steps of a house, where Brooks was waiting.

  “There’s nobody.”

  “They’re out here. We have to keep searching.”

  The quake shook at their feet. It was powerful enough to knock Jake off balance. The asphalt of the street cracked down the middle, following the length of the road, and a burst of gas clouded upward. It was silent again, and the earth stopped shaking.

  They heard a scream nearby, and a woman came running from a house down the street. Jake adjusted his eyes. The woman was covered in red that poured from her neck down the front of her shirt. An instant later, one of the Marked followed from the house.

  Brooks pointed the Glock and fired. He fired again.

  “We need to get closer,” Jake said, and the two men ran down the street. The woman was running toward them, the Marked on her heels. She screamed for help as the Marked dove at her, sinking its teeth into her skull quickly, but jumped back to its feet instantly, continuing to run at the two men.

  Brooks stopped to steady his aim. He fired and the bullet struck the asphalt behind the demon. It didn’t break its stride. Jake held the revolver out, and fired. The bullet sank into the flesh of the Marked under its chin and it doubled over, sliding to a halt on the pavement.

  They ran to the woman. She was dead, and blood pooled underneath her.

  The shrieks were loud and plentiful down the street.

  “We need to get back. They heard us.”

  Jake turned and they started to run back up the street to the church. The earth shook again, and the sky went white above them in the blink of an eye. The purple glints of light disappeared and a calm whiteness took over.

  There were more shrieks behind them, terrorizing and evil, and they saw the Marked. There were hundreds of them, running down the street.

  “Go, Brooks, let’s move.”

  Jake was squinting against the light in a full sprint, Brooks behind him. For a big man, he moved quickly.

  A Marked came at them from the side, out of one of the houses.

  “Watch it!”

  The Marked lunged at Jake and hit him from the side, knocking him onto his back. The ground shook again and the cracked asphalt split wider, forming a deep chasm as gas exhaled out in a green mist.

  Jake put his forearms up at the neck of the Marked on top of him. Its teeth were gnashing in a blood filled bite. It clawed with sharp nails at Jake’s sides, pressing its head down against his forearms; its teeth were inches from Jake’s hairline.

  Brooks wrapped one big arm around the waist of the Marked and hurled it sideways toward the chasm in the street. The Marked flailed its arms as its body went rolling along the pavement and into the crack. It was swallowed up in a heated gas and it screamed as it scratched at the sidewalls of the hole.

  Jake barely had a moment to recover before a big, black hand pulled him to his feet and they were running again.

  The Marked were close behind them, snarling in anguished hate. The street was a chaotic marathon of demon-people set on catching their prey.

  “God, help us,” Jake called out in panic. The Marked were too close for him to turn and shoot effectively. He pointed his revolver behind his back and fired until the cylinder clicked on empty chambers.

  Ahead at the church, the priest had heard the shooting. He opened the door and saw the two men running at him in the white light, Brooks shooting the Glock repeatedly behind his back, the bullets crashing uselessly into the pavement just yards away from his own feet. The street behind them was alive with evil, a canvas of snarling paint.

  The priest lit the pilot of the flamethrower. He clicked the trigger once and a fireball belched out. He stepped out from the doorway, as Thomas held the door open.

  Jake was faster, and he dove into the doorway of the church. The priest was in a crouch. As soon as Brooks’ legs passed him into the church, he held the trigger down. The shrieks went from hate to pain, and a mass of the Marked tumbled forward, their bodies burning underneath their agonized screams. The incoming Marked ignited as the stream of flammable gas burrowed out sixty feet from the priest’s fingertip.

  The priest sidestepped to the door, keeping his finger down on the trigger until the overheating sensor kicked in and the flame shut off.

  The church door shut and Thomas wrapped the handles with the rope, securing it closed. The barrel of the flamethrower was sizzling as the priest held it away from him, the heat filling the foyer. The screams of the Marked outside were a nightmare of pain, uncomfortable even to hear.

  “Get all the windows, all the doors. They’ll be trying to get in,” Jake said.

  “It’s all shut and locked,” Morris said. The old man grabbed Jake by the shoulders. He had a small smile on his lips and anticipation in his eyes. He jerked his head to the windows. “Boy, that is God outside.”

  The white light outside was piercing through the stain g
lass windows, the church was ablaze with light.

  Jake made the sign of the cross over his chest. He ran to the side door of the church, checking the security of the rope lock on the handles. He could hear the moaning of the Marked from the outside. They were trying to pry the doors open, jerking on the door from the outside and slamming inward on it with their body weight, clawing at the crack. It sounded like there were millions of them outside, groaning painfully.

  Thomas had climbed the staircase to the bell tower of the old church. From his high point he could see the hordes of the Marked that were streaming in from the streets, the alleys, the fields, the houses that surrounded the church. There were hundreds at the church doors and more coming in from every direction.

  “They’re all around us. Make sure those doors are secure,” he called down, his yell being swallowed up by the groans of the Marked.

  The doors were shaking at the efforts of the evil, and their fingernails were making a sinister clawing noise. Even the brick walls seemed to rattle inside. The other people in the church pews were shaken. Some calling out to God, and some kneeling in silent prayer in the pews.

  “Bring up the holy water,” Thomas yelled down.

  The priest grabbed the three gallon aluminum can of holy water from the sacristy. He pulled it from its stand and carried it up the stairs to the bell tower with the help of Jake. The rattling of the church was becoming louder as the groans from the Marked reverberated along the brick walls and up the steel cages that encased the stain glass windows.

  “This is all we have,” the priest handed the can to Thomas.

  “What about the bottled water?”

  The priest nodded his head and ran back down the stairs to the cache of water bottles. He spread his hands over them in prayer.

  From his birds-eye view in the bell tower, Thomas had a direct overlook of the Marked that were crowding around the church on the west side. The bell tower had an opening large enough to hang out of. The bell had been removed decades earlier.

  Thomas pulled the aluminum top from the case and leaned it out the opening. The Marked below howled in agony as the holy water came down like glass and showered them. What happened next, below them on the pavement surrounding the church, made all the refugees inside shudder in fear.

  In hindsight, it was a bad idea. The Marked who received the shower of holy water, writhed and twitched on the pavement as Satan released his grip on them. They became human again, unseeded by evil. The first to see the change was the Marked around them.

  The screams outside sent a chill through the air. The Marked ripped into the newly baptized people, tearing their limbs from their bodies, and sinking their teeth sharply down to the bone.

  The attention of the Marked at the door was redirected to the frenzy on the pavement. As the screams of the people trembled through the air, the other Marked heard it as a calling.

  Below the bell tower, Thomas could see the pavement being stained with blood under the rage of the Marked. He sank away from the opening and prayed for forgiveness.

  The screams subsided. The church doors came alive again as the Marked continued their efforts to gain entry. Their groans grew louder into a gnashing of belligerence.

  The intense light from outside dimmed. It was sudden, and the stain glass windows grew dark, the church becoming a cave of obscurity. There were frightened screams from the refugees inside that echoed against the brick and further enraged the blood appetites of the Marked outside.

  The brightness disappeared and with the darkness came the cold. Intense, biting cold that chilled the church instantly and frosted the windows. The banging of the church doors became more. The activity of the Marked erupted into an effort to gain shelter from the cold. They shrieked in distress at rapidly dropping temperature.

  The wind howled. In the darkness of the church, the wind blustered against the windows, drowning the noise of the Marked. The wind blew in with the force of a hurricane, knocking the demons off their feet outside and uprooting the small trees in the church courtyard.

  “Get under the pews,” Jake yelled out to the small congregation. His voice carried only as far as the ears directly around him, as the wind vibrated the brick walls.

  They heard the crack of the wooden doors on the south side of the church. The hinges couldn’t handle the force of the wind, and the doors ripped from their supports, crashing into the blackness of the church. The whine of the wind sounded like a siren, high-pitched and screeching through the foyer. Dirt, leaves, and gravel rode the freezing wind and peppered into the pews.

  He heard a crash and a plume of smoke and rubble rushed out from the bell tower where Jake’s father had been. The ceiling of the church had ripped open, and the cold air bit at his skin.

  Jake looked up at the doors, shielding his eyes with his hands. He couldn’t see anything in the darkness. It was pitch black in front of him. His lips cracked in the cold. His eyes dried up. And then he saw the red eyes of the Marked come pouring into the church by the dozen.

  The foyer of the church became a volcano of fire. Jake could see the silhouette of the priest between him and the fireball. The church lit up and Jake could see the faces of those around him, frightened and panicked. The priest held down the trigger until it ceased its fury. The flaming bodies of the Marked ran throughout the foyer, past the priest, and down the center aisle of the church before relinquishing their life and falling over.

  The flames died out, but the church remained bright. The darkness was gone. Jake looked at the stain glass which blared bright whiteness from outside. He moved his eyes to the opening at the foyer of the church, expecting to see more of the Marked come streaming in. Nothing moved. The wind had stopped as suddenly as it came, and it disappeared with the darkness. It was silent and suddenly warm. Only the brightness from outside was present and a soothing sensation came over him. A calming goodness. The screams of the people inside had quieted. Their faces were calm, and they each held a peaceful expression, looking toward the brightness from the windows.

  Jake looked to the burned bodies of the Marked in the center aisle. They were gone. There were only ashy remains in their place.

  The priest stood in the foyer. He had already removed the flamethrower from his back and was beginning to walk out into the bright white that illuminated the church from the open doors.

  Jake ran toward him. The priest was in a trance, walking with his head up and his arms out by his side. Stepping into the white outside, the priest’s body was enveloped in the brightness, and Jake couldn’t see him anymore. Jake ran with his hands up, shielding his eyes from the piercing light.

  At the church doors, Jake hesitated. The pure whiteness of the light outside was magnificent. It was warm and calm. He felt no fear. He believed. With his feet still inside the church, he could not see the priest outside the doors. He was gone. There were no Marked in sight either. There were no charred remains. No bodies of the demons, speared by God’s smite. There was nothing but the brightness that lit up the pavement, the trees, the buildings, the houses, and the grass.

  Jake took a step out into the whiteness. The world transformed before him. The pavement was gone. There were no streets, no trees or buildings. He had stepped out of the world as he knew it. The physical realm had disappeared. His skin tingled and he was comforted by an unseen presence that held his body in a tender reassurance. There was no pavement below his feet. He walked on a cloud of pure whiteness and he was calm.

  He saw his father standing before him in a halo of bright white, his mother by his side.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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