by Aiden James
“You didn’t even know I had this on me, did you?” I said, pretending to be calm while my heart raced. “Your supernatural gifts, it seems, have waned since you started taking super-roids. Let’s see if you still have any natural cognitive skills left, asshole—I’m about to put this bad boy back in its protective cover and then hide it to where you’ll never find it. ‘See you in a few’, you stupid jackass!”
I launched myself into the crevice, calculating I had maybe two seconds to get through it unscathed. I was right about that part. It took me three ticks to do it—long enough for Kaslow to sink four shots into my right leg and shoulder. Hollow points are especially painful, and I grimaced while scaling the stairs as quickly as I could. I focused my thoughts on closing the wounds and dissolving the bullet shards, since that seems to help sometimes. I didn’t allow myself to think of him turning his weapon—along with the other guns he carried on his back—upon everyone else. I was banking on the cold-hearted competitor I had known for decades—that this nature would still be entwined inside whatever Kaslow was becoming. If I was right, he would ignore the others and be on my ass before I made it out of the narrow tunnel.
It turned out I was pretty damned close in my prediction.
I worried about the commotion I heard coming from the bunker, but the explosion that sent splintered rock shards into my backside just before I reached the first ‘bigger’ tunnel on the way back to the castle confirmed my hope. I prayed for enough of a head start to get inside the castle before he caught up to me. And, yes, I fully expected Kaslow’s enhanced physical stature to aid him fully in that regard. I didn’t care if he did catch me…just as long as I had the chance to hide my coin first.
* * *
I worried the echo from my footfalls as I raced up the tunnels would become my undoing. That was the illogical side of my brain talking, since Kaslow already knew I was heading back to the castle. To my knowledge, this was the only route to get back there from the caverns.
Even with his arsenal—which I assumed was still strapped on his back—he was steadily gaining on me. An explosion erupted from the wall to my right as I sprinted the last two hundred feet to the castle. I had no doubt a fresh, massive cavity now existed in the wall where the grenade-rocket exploded behind me. The wound would surely be a near-perfect match for the gaping hole that marked what remained of the castle’s ancient doorway to the tunnels.
“Stop, William!” Kaslow shouted from behind me. “Stop, or I’ll obliterate your very essence from this planet!!”
I’m sure he meant it. But obliteration would be my eventual fate at his hands anyway. I glanced briefly over my left shoulder…he was less than one hundred feet behind me.
“Go screw yourself, Viktor!”
Now, I’m certain many would wonder why I didn’t shout something more vulgar—especially since by now everyone has seen I have no real qualms about using colorful language to make a point. Such vulgarities are beyond commonplace in the line of work that Kaslow and I once engaged in. And, I knew he would use my verbal reaction to gauge my emotional state in determining his next move. Me raising Cain and allowing a full serving of the vilest vernacular to pour from my mouth would only point to an out of control temper. That in turn makes for an easy mark, and a quick elimination as a target. Had it been Cedric running and not me—given my old friend’s fondness for swear words—he would never reach the recently widened doorway alive.
Those few extra seconds while Kaslow tried to determine where I might dodge and weave next—since that’s how I was running at the time—could improve the infinitesimal chance my head might still be attached to my body as I crossed the threshold into the castle. As it was, I encountered three close calls where rockets raced past me and crashed somewhere inside the castle. More granite blocks toppled to the ground, from where they had been carefully stacked and bonded onto each other for twenty-five thousand years—the age of the castle, according to Francisco. There were bullets, too, and fortunately most of the shots passed through me without hitting my most vital organs.
“One way or the other you will die today, William!” Kaslow called from behind me as I scurried past the entrance. Damage to the inside of the castle was extensive, and I knew then that Francisco, Rafael, and the rest of their Essene tribe would soon be looking for a new home—if they survived beyond the afternoon. “Give me what I’ve come for, and I will kill you quickly and leave your pitiful son, his fiancée, and your wife alone. Otherwise, if you push me any further, I will make all of them suffer!”
I didn’t stop running, and would be in the reception area in just a moment. My mind was filled with a flurry of images, as I tried to subtly picture a suitable hiding place for my coin. Another quick glance over my shoulder confirmed what his nearer-sounding voice had hinted at. He was less than fifty feet away. There wasn’t anywhere suitable on the main floor to flee to, and I briefly considered trying to race him to the front of the castle and then out the door to the other cavern and beyond.
“Well? What’s it going to be, William…Judas?”
My only viable choice was to climb the stairs and scurry to the very top. Looking at how the stone stairs were constructed, it would be tough to bring them down, unless Kaslow’s rockets hit the structure just right…. Or, if he had picked up his FGR device from the bunker and brought it with him, he could feasibly make the stairway vanish beneath my feet. Something told me, however, this could work to my advantage if I made it far enough up the stairs before they disappeared. I might have the advantage of a thirty to forty foot distance he couldn’t bridge.
“Well, for one thing, you already swore you’d kill everyone that mattered to me back in Hong Kong,” I said, sprinting up the stairs while he came around the corner into the reception area.
“And, your point is?”
My heart felt like it skipped a beat when I saw he had exchanged his rocket launcher and whatever gun he had been firing at me for the FGR. Obviously, Kaslow’s strength could easily support the heavy weapon with one hand, but he seemed to be reveling in the fact my demise was about to happen. He calmly stepped up to the base of the stairs while cradling it with both hands. I had made it up to the third floor, seeing him prepare his aim of the FGR on where I was about to step. As it had so often in the past, his arrogance might serve me in the present. If I played the right card to engender the reaction I needed.
“Aside from being a bad liar, Viktor, you are nothing more than a sleazy, weak fucking coward!”
I added a good dose of angry sounding tone to boot, while rounding the stairs from the fourth to fifth floors as I shouted at him. Yes, this certainly sounds like a contradiction to my earlier point. But this time, I baited him on purpose. Baited the bastard into thinking I had lost my mental edge and was dealing with him from an emotional basis.
Kaslow took the bait, but instead of trying to simply make the stairs disappear beneath my feet, the beam from the FDR was erratic, landing everywhere like a youngster pissing in a pot for the first time. For those unaware of how this technology works—or was originally designed to work—the beam disassembles the molecular structure of the target, making it disappear in layers. The effect is temporary, as after several hours the structure is restored to its original molecular status—which is to say, it comes back to its original form and place. Aside from slight detail changes, everything will look as it did before the beam erased it from our reality.
Part of the red granite blocks dissolved around me, and I nearly fell through stairs that had been there only a moment before. The errant thrusts from the beam took out much of the fifth floor veranda, negating my idea of leaping from the stairway to that floor. My choices were rapidly narrowed down to two: I could either jump to the ground and hope whatever broken bones I incurred would heal fast enough as I ran away from him—which surely anyone would call an impossibility—or, keep climbing the staircase. Rapidly becoming unstable, its collapse in a tumbling heap of heavy granite blocks was imminent.
&n
bsp; Kaslow laughed uproariously below, obviously amused as I barely made it to floor six and persisted to try to make it to floor eight, where the rooftop garden sat. Since I doubted he knew about the garden, I tried to keep my mind clear, focused instead on his near misses, since he no longer seemed content to hit the structure around me. A close nip that made the shoulder of my polo shirt unravel and disappear told me that he was just as content to watch the layers of my body disappear. That honestly frightened me, as I considered the possibility my cells might not know they had been damaged if they were simply removed from this reality to another. I might actually die from a simple hit to my extremities, where normally the healing regeneration process would immediately kick in.
“Had enough, William?!” he laughed.
“You damned near hit the pocket holding my coin…wouldn’t it be funny if you fucked that up, too, you dumbass!”
Chalk one up for this angry Jew. Kaslow’s smirk that I could barely detect from this height might’ve faded…hard to say for sure. He returned his efforts on the structure itself. But, his moment of foolishness allowed me to make it to the top floor. I no longer hid my thoughts, since he was too damned far away to stop me from leaping onto the patio. The shots he did take at me came up short. However, the stairway finally collapsed from the multitude of holes he had put into it along its near one-hundred-foot length. It crashed like an avalanche upon the floor below. The rubble landing on his ass would’ve been a wonderful bonus, although I wasn’t about to look over the edge and see what became of him.
So, for a moment I felt safe…but safety brought me time to think about my boy, Alistair, and of course Amy and the rest of those who are human. I prayed my assumption of Kaslow’s shifting focus solely upon me would protect everyone else from further harassment and injury was correct. I didn’t allow myself to entertain the maddening debate of ‘what ifs’ that naturally followed an emboldened move like the one I had made down in the bunker.
As expected, the patio garden sat deserted. Small puddles of water covered the stone benches and tables dotting the area from earlier storms, as the sun above tried to break through the thick, low-hanging cloud cover. I felt a slight pull upon my heart to see the fountain in the middle of the garden…it was identical to the one in my dream, sans the flowing gold metal bands and the real angel sitting upon the pool’s edge, of course.
The air around me became very still, and I allowed my ears to gather what they could from my enemy far below. There were no more explosions, or the sound of crackling matter being sucked away below me. Yes, I had considered that Kaslow in his rage might try to erase the castle, floor by floor, and bring me back down to where I had last seen him, in the reception area.
I quietly moved past the fountain as I listened, where the jets were operating at a trickle compared to the full spray I had witnessed the previous night in my dream. For a moment, I was tempted to pull out my coin again from its present home, wrapped in the cerecloth inside my pants pocket. But then I remembered how hard it was to resist the pull back in time. Trances in the past have often lasted anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour—and this coin’s pull would likely correspond to the terrible visions I had experienced and be far longer and much more intense.
To distract myself from further temptation in regard to this temporarily silent Singing Coin, I began working on a plan to get back down to the ground without Kaslow’s awareness. Hoping for another exit near the garden’s wall overlooking the stream far below, I decided to check there first. The view of the Andean wilderness was incredible, and the drop off from here to the stream that looked much more like a raging river—and even sounded like one from where I gazed—seemed farther than the hundred-foot distance from the garden to the castle’s main floor. The angle of the mountainside might’ve had something to do with this.
“It’s almost enchanted, is it not?”
I whirled around to see where the scornful voice was coming from. Viktor Kaslow stood less than thirty feet away. I tried to look unsurprised while my mind raced to try and understand how he had made it up here—and how I had been unaware of his presence until he spoke. There was no immediate logical answer for it, although those questions hardly mattered anyway. He was armed with his preferred Steyr and had it pointed at my chest.
“How could anyone like you ever appreciate anything the Almighty has given us to enjoy by His mercy?” I said, moving my right hand closer to my pocket. He eyed me coldly and raised the gun to where the sight was trained upon my left eye. Kill shot time. “Don’t you want me to hand you this first?”
It was dicey. Kaslow could kill me and simply fish the coin out of my pocket himself. Frankly, it’s what I expected him to do…. However, my intuitions urged me to dig out the coin and its protective cerecloth with the expectation he wouldn’t.
“It won’t save those you love, you know,” he said evenly. “When I’m through with you, I will still hunt them down. Maybe not today, or even tomorrow…. Hell, William, I might take an extended vacation while I rearrange the world you’ll be leaving to my liking. Then, after a year or two passes, I’ll come to call on them when they believe I have forgotten my grudge against all things named Barrow. Perhaps you’ll have a great vantage point from the bosom of your god. But I’d like to think you’ll be wasting away in agony some years from now on this same planet, and wallowing in the fact you failed to protect those closest to you, while also failing mankind as a whole. I’ll smile broadly then.”
He was right…or could be right. If I died that afternoon, I would in all likelihood continue my tortuous journey on earth several years from now. The world might be vastly different, and there would be no Alistair, Amy, and certainly not my beloved Beatrice. Lucifer could not concoct a crueler hell than that for me.
I continued to pull out the coin from my pocket, making sure my eyes and facial expression gave him no indication as to what I thought or felt. This time, I also made certain my fingers only touched the cerecloth. The ancient wax made the shroud material slippery…just enough. I gingerly gripped the glowing coin by its edges and held it up to him, as if ready to hand it over. The coin’s scream was quite loud in my mind. I wondered if the damned thing somehow ‘knew’ what I had in store for it.
“How’s your swimming these days, Viktor?”
His gloating, victorious expression changed ever so slightly, and I could almost see the wheels turning behind his glowing blue eyes. But confusion was there also.... Before he understood the reason behind my question, I pressed my fingers together while throwing my wrist back toward the wall. The coin went sailing over the edge.
I expected to be dead before Kaslow made it to the wall. However, he ran past me and peered at the fast-flowing water below. The gleaming coin was just a blue pinpoint by then, and it soon disappeared into the swollen mountain stream. In a matter of a minute, it would roll along and be carried down into the subterranean chasm the stream flowed into, less than fifty yards away. Suddenly, as if some extreme insanity had seized Kaslow’s diabolically cold and calculating mind, he climbed up on the ledge and dove toward the water.
Granted, we’re not talking about the apex of the castle, where the spires that loomed behind the garden climbed another three hundred feet. But a dive into relatively shallow water from over one hundred feet would constitute a death wish for most people. Only an immortal—one who would likely recover from broken bones and not too many organ lacerations—would attempt such a feat. I understood more about Kaslow’s immortality in that moment than at any other time since he joined the ranks of those who can’t die. And, if he could make such a sacrifice for the sake of evil’s perpetuation, then how could I sit back and simply watch it happen?
“I’m doing this for You,” I said, raising my face toward the sky, as I climbed upon the wall’s ledge. “Please do something to help me stop him—help me save the world You so love!”
I didn’t wait for a response—either a physical sign, or a confirmation in my heart. I took a deep
breath, and then I jumped.
Chapter 15
Trying to follow Kaslow’s fearless swan dive into the stream would’ve proved deadly to my current body. I’m not a terrible diver by any means, and I have participated in cliff dives from several hundred feet in the latest version of ‘me’. But those took me down into the safer depths of the Pacific and Indian oceans back in the early 1960s.
To have any chance of survival in my present predicament, where the water couldn’t be any deeper than twenty feet at any point along the stream’s course, I would have to land like a paratrooper along either bank and then somersault to lessen the impact. Surely that still meant broken bones and some internal lacerations at the very least—if I was lucky. But it was the only option I could see for catching Kaslow before he disappeared into the underground chasm, carried forth by the fast-moving current.
My immediate goal was not to recover the coin I had just tossed over the rooftop garden’s edge. Rather, it was solely to keep him from recovering it.
But as I jumped, I could neither sustain my vertical uprightness nor avoid being pulled toward the stream itself. Was this some unforeseen additional curse from the coin? Hard to say…but definitely not the result I was hoping for.
Crushed bones a broken neck, and likely injuries that proved fatal would’ve been my immediate fate. But similar to what happened in my vivid dream from the previous night, a pair of powerful hands grabbed my shoulders just before I slammed chest-first into the stream.
“Do not fight against me, Judas!” said the angelic voice I immediately recognized. In the swirling water’s reflection, I could see Moroni’s enormous wingspan behind me. Meanwhile, I hovered above the surface by less than two feet. The clouds above were dissipating, and the sun’s warm rays glistened upon the angel’s opal and lavender feathers that twitched with the same urgent energy in his voice. “Elohim has heard your prayer!”