The Wrath of Jeremy

by Stephen Andrew Salamon

  “What other little shit, what the hell are you talking about?” Michael yelled, and his body finally stopped twitching.

  “You see if I told you, then that means you’ll have a better chance at completing the mission. I’m not going to allow you to do that!” Victor turned on the shock machine again.

  “What mission?” Michael screamed, feeling his body quivering even more, due to the elevated voltage being pumped into him.

  Victor stopped the machine once again and leisurely walked over to a table that was on the right side of the room. He opened up a drawer that was in the table and pulled out a gun, holding it up in the air, wanting Michael to see it and fear it. Victor walked over to Michael’s twitching body as Jeremy and Gabriel watched with trepidation, misery, horror in their eyes and in their thoughts, still gasping for cool air through the vent, and still gaping at Victor, waiting impatiently to see what he was going to do next. Victor tore off Michael’s red, striped shirt and allowed his chest to be revealed. On Michael’s chest was a mark that resembled an angel’s wing, like a birthmark, only it seemed like more of a burn mark. Jeremy and Gabriel looked at the mark, widened their horrified sight and felt their own chests. “I have the same scar,” Gabriel whispered.

  “I had the same scar, too, but I had it removed when I was seven,” Jeremy also spoke.

  Victor placed the gun directly on the winged scar and pulled back the trigger. “Maybe this will help you understand what I’m talking about!” Jeremy and Gabriel watched with tears forming in both of their eyes, yearning to help Michael, wanting to feel the cool air as well, since they were almost frying in the vent. Silence and panic, rage and terror both spoke in Jeremy, Gabriel and especially Michael, watching as Victor slowly pulled the trigger on the gun. Then Victor shot Michael in the chest. Jeremy yelled after Gabriel put his hand over his mouth, knowing that Victor would try to kill them as well if he knew they were in the room behind the vent. The tears began falling out of both of them as they watched the blood gushing out from Michael’s chest.

  Michael yelled, seeing Victor laughing, but his mind was confused as to why he would be so evil. “What are you yelling about?” Victor questioned before Jeremy and Michael tried desperately to open the vent lid.

  But suddenly Jeremy felt a grip on his legs. He turned around slowly, thinking it was a rat or something, when unexpectedly he saw Curtis in his view. Curtis grabbed both of their legs with the blood pouring out even more from Michael’s chest. Curtis opened the vent and pushed Jeremy and Michael through it; they fell to the ground where Michael’s blood lay. Curtis jumped through the vent, grabbed the both of them, and walked up to Victor. “Well, well, well, if it isn’t the other two shits,” Victor shouted. Jeremy and Gabriel perceived that Michael was starting to go into deep shock.

  “Help him, he’s going to die,” yelled Gabriel.

  Victor smacked Gabriel across the face and laughed, “Just watch!” Victor pointed to Michael’s chest and they watched as the wound began to seal and heal itself up. Michael suddenly came out of shock, looked at his chest and discovered the wound had vanished.

  Confusion came over Michael, Gabriel and Jeremy, not knowing or understanding what just happened. As they stood in bafflement, Curtis walked up to Victor, smiled, and then punched him in the face, saying, “Why the hell did you shoot him, Peter? Jastian told us specifically what to do, and this wasn’t a part of the plan!”

  Jeremy questioned, “Isn’t your name Victor?”

  “I told you not to ever call me that again, Christopher, my name is Victor now,” he yelled out.

  “Well, don’t call me Christopher then, my name is Curtis now!”

  “You started it first, you called—” Victor yelled before Curtis hit him over the head.

  “Just drop it, Victor!”

  “Well anyway, Jastian didn’t tell us anything about not shooting them, he just said to keep them here until—” said Victor, being interrupted by Jeremy.

  “Listen, I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I’m getting out of here. I’ll leave you and Christopher alone,” Jeremy screamed. He then darted for the door.

  “Don’t you ever call us by those names again, my name to you is ‘Curtis’!” Curtis ran up to Jeremy and hit him across the face. “And you, I don’t ever want you calling me that name again either,” Curtis added, hitting Victor on the head again.

  “We already had this argument, you asshole!” yelled Victor, hitting Curtis in the face. During the fight that was as if Curtis and Victor were two kids, fighting over nothing, the cross began to shake in Jeremy’s pants. Victor noticed Jeremy staring down at his pants, so he asked suspiciously, “What do you have in your pants?” Victor stopped arguing with Curtis and walked quickly up to Jeremy. He reached inside of his pants and pulled out the cross. Curtis walked up to Victor, looked over Victor’s shoulders and noticed the stained blood marks on the statue’s right hand and feet.

  “My God, it has already begun—drop that!” Curtis screamed, with Victor’s finger getting pricked by the sharp end of the cross. As he dropped it on the floor, Victor noticed his own blood mark on Jesus’s left hand while sucking his pricked finger. “Oh shit,” shouted Curtis, noticing the blood marks on the feet and right and left hands of Jesus beginning to glow. Jeremy picked up the cross and tried to prick his finger against the sharp end of it, but it wouldn’t pierce his flesh. Wondering why his finger wasn’t being pricked by it, he looked at Curtis and noticed the fear in his eyes as he stared at the cross. It was like the cross was a gun, a bomb to Curtis’s sight. So, Jeremy threw the cross at Curtis, and he reached out to stop it from hitting his face. As Curtis reached out his left hand, the cross hit it and caused his finger to also be pricked. He looked down at the cross as it fell to the cold, white floor and noticed his own blood on the statue’s thorns. Curtis turned his head to Jeremy, and fixed his eyes levelly with Jeremy’s own, and shouted, “Now, look what you’ve done. We have to get out of here now!”

  Suddenly, Grewsal shook, first lightly, and then rapidly, the floors pulling up from their places and shooting concrete everywhere. The walls cracked slowly and the light fixtures fell to the ground. “It doesn’t mean anything, they still have to retrieve the maps, the Wrath isn’t happening yet, Curtis,” said Victor, trying to calm down Curtis.

  “I know, but in Jastian’s Testament, it states that this is the first sign of the Wrath. Face it, Victor, this building is going to collapse,” Curtis screamed.

  Confusion, even greater than before, took over Gabriel, Michael and Jeremy’s minds, collapsing their thoughts into nothing. They didn’t have any clue as to what was happening or what just happened. “What are you guys talking about?” Jeremy demanded as the lights went out in the institution. The darkness turned to a red luster as the emergency lights went on abruptly, and gave out a glow of red.

  “Oh shut up!” Curtis yelled at Jeremy, grabbing onto his arm and squeezing it. Victor unlocked Michael from the table and grabbed his left arm while holding onto Gabriel’s left shoulder. “Alright, let’s get the hell out of here, we’ll keep them at my place till their time runs out,” Curtis said, kicking open the door to the room and entering the crumbling hallway.

  Jeremy questioned, “Time runs out? What are you talking about?” But they wouldn’t answer him. They dragged them down the shaking hallway of Grewsal, Jeremy, Michael and Gabriel not knowing where the shaking was coming from. Their adventure would now begin.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Jeremy’s mother was awoken from her deep sleep to the sound of ear-piercing screaming coming from the darkened yellow cornfield that stood in the night’s mist behind their farmhouse. She shot up from her bed and shook her husband, trying to wake him, but with him being too deep in sleep to open his eyes at all she gave up on the mission. She decided to go check it out herself. She put on her blue cotton robe and ran down her old wooden staircase, entered the foyer, and opened the back door of the house, gazing out at the cornfield through th
e screen door that held mosquitoes and bugs that got wedged in the holes of it, trying to get through it. She stared at the fields of grandness, stretching for four square miles, and waited with her ear up to the screen of the door, trying to listen to see if she could hear another scream again. Sounds of crickets chirping, the wind howling in the darkness and flies buzzing around the outside light that hung over her head were the only noises heard, but she still listened. After waiting for ten seconds, a wave of shrieks appeared, with one of the screams sounding like her son, Jeremy, crying out in the shadows of the cornfield. She whacked open the screen door, stood upon her porch of wood, and shouted, “Jeremy!” There in the distance, right before the cornfield, stood Jeremy, crying, with five other kids his age, all standing and staring at her. The other kids had no faces, she noticed, just a straight shield of flesh that allowed her fears to shout, “Jeremy, get away from them.”

  She ran up to them all, and saw tears forming on all of their flesh where their eyes should be, and only seeing flesh with tears coming down them. “Jeremy, who are these kids? And what happened to their faces? And why aren’t you at Grewsal, Jeremy? Come in the house now, and I’ll call the ambulance for you kids to have your faces checked out!” Yet there was no answer.

  Then a large wind blew over the field, and Jeremy answered in a straight tone, with no high or low pitches, “I am at Grewsal, Mother.”

  She then cried out, “No you’re not, you’re here. I’m so sorry that I didn’t call you for so long, but I tried, and the doctors said that I couldn’t speak to you because of the treatment; it might affect the progress of it if you heard the voice of a loved one. They told all the parents that. I don’t know why. Is that why you ran away from Grewsal?”

  Suddenly, Jeremy and the faceless kids ran into the cornfield, screaming out a roar of sounds, and the mother entered the field as well, racing to catch up with Jeremy. Panting and sweating, nicked by the sharp stalks that stood tall and wide, the mother raced for an hour, finally entering the middle of the field, where there stood a small prairie-like plateau. The faceless kids stood around Jeremy, with Jeremy crying out, “Mother, it has started, don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.”

  Before her words could exit through her tears, the five faceless young adults turned into demons, with red wings shooting out of their scorched backs, and horns appearing through their scalps, shooting blood out of the new wounds where the horns exited, and filling the grassy ground with red. Their faces formed demon-like qualities, with bloody lips, black eyes, and red skin, all laughing out a low, deep giggle that gave the mother goose bumps up her spine. The mother screamed and wailed, seeing them all closing in on Jeremy’s innocent face, when suddenly they disappeared, leaving Jeremy and her alone there. Each of the five demons went to each of the four ends of the cornfield. Two demons stood on one end, and the other three went to the other ends, all covering the square cornfield. Abruptly, each of them turned to flames of great fire, catching all the ends of the cornfield into a blaze, with the blaze closing in on Jeremy and her mother.

  “Oh my God, Jeremy, all the ends of the field are on fire. We’ll be burned alive,” the mother screamed, feeling the heat from the tremendous speed of the fire getting closer to their flesh. Suddenly the flames entered into where they stood, so she grabbed Jeremy, and said to his tears, “We have to leave now. Those things set the field on fire!”

  Jeremy looked at her with tears falling from his sickly, pale face, and answered, “We can’t, Mother…this is home!” Quickly, the flames took over their bodies and burnt their skin, and the mother felt the stinging pain of the flames torturing her flesh. She screamed, “No!”

  The mother closed her eyes, the flames so bright that she could still see them through her closed lids. Through the flames and her closed eyes, she suddenly found herself in her bed, at night, jumping up in a panic and touching her skin where there were no flames to be found. She realized it was all a dream. Feeling her flesh, she still felt warmth on it, but the night and her room depicting it were only a nightmare. She got up from her bed and looked out her back window of the house, gazing at the cornfield to make sure it was just a dream. Still smelling the scent of burning corn stalks, she saw the darkened cornfield still standing. She whispered to the darkness, “I miss you, Jeremy. May God be with you….”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Darkness shadowed Grewsal, and clouds of images that seemed to be formed by the lightning shot out toward the earth of misty shadows. Mary drove past the gates of Grewsal and parked right next to some bushy, overgrown foliage with thorny protrusions that sat next to the building of gothic proportions. “Here we go, we’re finally here,” Mary said to David. He sat mutely in the passenger’s seat and stared at the razor-sharp thorns that hung from the bushes they had parked next to. She turned off the car, took off her seat belt, smiled to David and added, “Boy, I didn’t think that plane was going to leave this early, we made very good time.” She glanced at her rear-view mirror to check her hair for a moment and perceived her cross that hung from it, dangling still from the car being in motion before. She gazed at the cross very strongly, intuitively, noticing something different about it. “What happened here?” she asked, noticing bloodstains on the feet, thorns and both hands of the miniature Jesus. “It’s probably rust!”

  “I know what it is,” said David, looking toward the cross.

  “Well, David, we’ll talk about it as soon as you get settled in Grewsal.” Mary then smiled to David and turned to face Grewsal, seeing red lights gleaming outward through every eye-like window the fortress held. At first she didn’t know what to say, noticing what seemed to be flames building up behind the windows, yet they were not flames of fire, just red lights that waved in the shadows of Grewsal’s darkness. She had not ever seen anything like it before. Stirs of faint echoes emerged from the blackness around them, speaking to them in whispers, but she was not able to understand them. Fear and trepidation soared over her eyes, shot at her flesh, twisting her panic to bloom into terror as she gawked at Grewsal, tears forming in her eyes from horror.

  “My God, what’s happening?” she screamed, racing out the door of her car and staring at the titanic fortress, noticing that it was beginning to glow and shake at the same time.

  She ran up to the building, paused by the door of Grewsal, and then after thinking about whether she should go in or not, Mary grabbed onto the doorknob and felt a stinging sensation hit her hand. The flesh on her hand was scalded from the doorknob, so she scuttled down the stairs again and went to her car, looking for something she could wrap her hand in. Tears of pain made their way through her confused eyes, hesitating on whether she should call the fire department on her own, or else have David call them while she tried her hardest to save whoever was jammed in Grewsal’s stomach. While she looked and searched quickly, David got out of the car and watched the fortress with his eyes widening and with a smile unhurriedly creeping out through his lips. “Well, Jastian, it looks like you’re pissed,” he laughed out.

  Mary then found a handkerchief, wrapped it around her hand, and dashed back toward Grewsal again. David ended his laughter, not wanting her to see his smirks toward Grewsal’s terror. “David, get in the car now and call 911. The cellphone’s in the glove compartment!” she shouted. Instead of running toward Grewsal like she did before, Mary decided to saunter patiently toward its terror, walking up the stairs, when swiftly she noticed the two statues of gargoyles were glowing crimson, with red light from out of their eyes. “What the hell is going on?” she yelled out, scampering up to the door, grabbing the doorknob with the hand she had the handkerchief on, and opening it up finally. Once the door opened, her eyes saw everything that human eyes weren’t ever supposed to be a bystander to; and this was just the commencement, the beginning of it all. Mary examined the glass statues of the saints that were in the foyer beginning to move around, walking around and abruptly stopping and staring at her presence.

  Silence. Panic. Mary stood stiff,
anxiety crammed her stomach, and the statues still gaped at her eyes as her pupils started to dilate in miserable nausea. She didn’t know whether to run or faint, walk or stand, horrified over which choice to make. Suddenly the entrance door to Grewsal slammed shut, so there was no escape for Mary. She screamed, seeing thick blood seeping through every end of the walls, dripping down them all, with some blood oozing onto her. She was terrified, her eyes pressing together with pain, praying that this was all a dream, but it wasn’t. Mary then raced over to the front desk of the foyer, and saw the head nurse sitting down in her chair. “Dolores, what’s going on? We have to get out of here. What’s happening?” Dolores got up, and with a straight, demented stare, slapped Mary across the face with immense force. At that point, Mary become aware of wings coming out of Dolores’s back and spreading out in a “V” formation. They were bright yellow wings, with a tint of white mixed in with their feathery texture. Each feather held small eyes to their body, and blood seeped out of each eye that gazed at Mary.

  Mary screamed, cried, started to run away from the monster-like angel she thought was a nurse, and frantically ran to the metal door, trying desperately to unlock the locks. The glass statues walked toward her, slowly, and she felt their body heat throughout her sweaty flesh. Her hands shook too much for her to get a good grip on the keys, so she dropped them, and tried to pick them up, knowing that the monster-like statues were coming toward her with the same motion in them all.

  Suddenly, as she bent over to pick up the keys, grasping the rusted keyring with her right index finger, the door burst open and out came Victor and Curtis with the boys in their grips. The building began to glow with a faint white light, and they all hid their eyes with their hands, becoming blinded by the light for a moment.