“Alright, the people are all around the building, but we can still get out of here. All we have to do probably is run over to that church,” said David, pointing to a church across the street. “I’ve been in that church before, and I know that they have a stairwell that leads to the sewer system under the streets. Now, once we get in there, all we have to do is call out for the miracle when no one is looking!” He paused when he noticed the vicious cameras were nowhere to be found. Yet before David and even Gabriel could say anything, the cameras of a possessed state started to grow from the walls and ceiling, and even the doorway.
“Wait a second, how about we all call for the miracle at every chance we could get? All we have to do is say it in our minds constantly, and that way when no one is looking, it would work,” Jeremy explained. He turned around and saw Sam standing next to them. “Sam? I don’t want you coming with us; it’s too dangerous. Just stay here!”
“No, I’m coming with you guys, I’m not staying here. There’s nothing you could say or do that will stop me,” Sam demanded with force.
Jeremy’s soul-like eyes gazed at Sam, craving to realize how he could alter her perception on coming, figuring out a way he could change her mind and force her to believe she’d be in danger. Searching every inch of her eyes of gorgeousness, Jeremy kept his trance on her, not even acknowledging Gabriel when he explained, “Dude, I think we should all split up, that way we have a better chance. I know Curtis and Victor are going to try to stop us again: this way, if they catch one of us, we all know that the other half still has a chance at calling out for the miracle successfully!” Gabriel saw Jeremy wasn’t paying attention to him, so he asked with a higher pitch, “Do you agree with me, Jeremy?”
Ignoring everything around him, Jeremy kept his eyes on Sam, demanding, “Sam, you’re not coming with us!”
Gabriel pulled David and Michael aside and began saying something to them while pointing at Jeremy. “Yes, I am, I’m not staying here,” Sam said.
The cameras grew rapidly, quickly, poking them in their bodies. David stepped between Jeremy and Sam, forcing Jeremy to look at him, taking charge and saying, “Alright, Michael, Gabriel and I decided that we should split up. Now, Jeremy, Sam and I are gonna go to the church, while Michael and Gabriel are gonna try to find some other means of escaping!”
Michael and Gabriel ran out of the doorway, and Jeremy noticed them, yelling to David, “Where are they going?” He saw Michael and Gabriel running opposite from the church that was across the street, disappearing in the thick, black rain that fell.
“I’ll explain it to you while were running,” David replied. He stepped out of the doorway and into water that reached three inches in height. “Come on!” he yelled as he began running toward the church.
Jeremy and Sam began running themselves, blind to the direction they were going, because they didn’t pay attention to David’s plan. As they ran, they would hide behind cars, when the crowds of people looked their way. Jeremy and the rest still were in great shock about Mary’s abrupt death, mixing altered fear in their emotions that ran high and sideways. Yet, they continued to run, leaving the arena behind with crowds of people still in its belly, trying to break down the door that was on the stage.
Meanwhile, Curtis and Victor got up from the ground slowly. They looked at each other in confusion, not seeing the boys anywhere, just perceiving Mary’s dead body. “They’re gone, shit, they’re gone…. I didn’t think I would say this, Victor, but I think it’s time to call out for...Jastian!”
“No, he’s gonna be pissed if he discovers we couldn’t handle this situation ourselves,” Victor said. He got up from the ground and looked at the video cameras as they hung from the ceilings and walls, and stood on the floors.
“We have to, Victor, we have to,” he said.
Victor then shot light from his right hand and allowed all the cameras to disappear in a heartbeat. “No, we can’t do it, Curtis!”
“Listen, Peter, we have to do it. Now, let’s call to him!”
Victor was shocked that Curtis called him “Peter”, showing an appalled face at being called by that word. “Alright, but under one condition. I’ll call to him with you, but you can never, ever call me by that name again. Whenever you call me ‘Peter’, I think back when Lucifer pushed us down the staircase and allowed us to see death,” Victor affirmed with anger.
He clutched onto Curtis’s hand, moved his eyes toward the ceiling and waited for Curtis to initiate the calling. “Alright, Victor, I promise. Now, let’s begin!” Their bodies turned into lustrous light, scanning the ceiling, watching it break apart and turn into the heavens that were black, atrociously stormy and thunder-packed, full of rage and lightning-like fury.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Hearts thrashing, their pace growing faster and harder, fortitude and anxiety forming into a titanic sentiment, David, Sam and Jeremy scampered diagonally across the street, running for their lives. They caught sight of a mob of extremists down the road looking for them through the lightning that the murky, menacing clouds gave. The precipitation, rain of razor-sharp iciness, fell in a multitude of splashes, full of triumphant transgression, hitting Sam’s widened eyes as she watched the mob in fear, causing blindness to strike her for a second till she was able to focus again. Still she ran, right beside Jeremy and David, focusing her eyes of tarnished hurt on the church doors, a feeling of future safety rushing over her once she reached the doors. David grabbed her hand tightly and Jeremy grabbed her other, and they stepped on the church’s stairs, inhaling a bit of relief for a moment, until surprisingly a person recognized them and screamed out, “The sinners are running away!”
Hastily, all of the people embarked on running in the direction of the church, mixing the emotions in Sam, David and Jeremy, distinguishing that they were the hunted, and no law could save them now. So, without words or any lexis of understanding, Jeremy let go of Sam’s hand and opened up the church’s doors before he signaled David and Sam to run in first by swaying his hand back and forth. Sam entered and David followed right behind, while Jeremy held the doors open, his eyes observing that the people were getting closer to the church. The lightning lit up the people and made them look like sinister Neanderthals, soaring through the shadows in search of their prey, persecuting human life that held faces of a supposedly threatening nature. Jeremy tried to close the doors at this sight, but they wouldn’t close, and his petrified eyes squinted hard, trying to pull up all the adrenalin he had at this crucial moment.
Pulling and yanking them, and even stepping outside to see if he could push them shut, Jeremy failed in all attempts, so he left the doors open and paused, to think how he could get them shut. Yet nothing came to him, not a thought or plan through his foreboding nerves. So he stuck his head in the doorway and yelled, “Help me with the doors!”
David approached him and tried his best at pushing the door shut. As they pushed, the people reached the staircase of the church, stopping in their tracks, and gawked at them with evil in their flesh, focusing on their eyes. Jeremy looked back at them. Jeremy watched the people’s motions, gazing at their idle feet, waiting for movement again, sucking his fear in on his prospected thoughts of what he should do if their feet begin to rise. Then, with Jeremy’s fears coming full circle, the people darted up the staircase, and right before the angry and bemused protestors could reach the doorway, Jeremy and David got the doors loose and shut them tight, holding the doors shut while they felt the people shoving and pounding at the door’s body, yelling in a screeching-like song.
After David locked the inside of the door, they ran through the empty church that was lit by hundreds of candles that surrounded the pews and altar, circling different statues and winding up to the church’s ceiling of glass, casting a glow over the church’s decorations of statues and mosaics; it gave out a haunting sensation to their minds. They raced down the aisle quickly.
“Alright, why isn’t the miracle working? I’m saying it over and ov
er in my head, and nothing’s happening!” shouted Jeremy.
They stopped in their tracks, landing in the middle of the aisle that was in the center of the church, and opened their eyes wider in the direction that David’s finger pointed: toward the altar with three priests at its marble, staring at them.
David shouted back, “That’s why nothing’s happening, Jeremy!”
“Get out of here!” one priest yelled. The other priests scampered away and entered the back room of the church through a small door on the right side of the altar.
“Please, sir, we need your help,” said David. The priest ran away from the altar and into the back room also, leaving Jeremy, Sam and David in the church alone. This brightened Jeremy’s gloom, realizing the fact that they were alone, they could call out for the miracle. No one was looking. Yet, before Jeremy could even think of the miracle or call it out, they all suddenly saw a video camera showing itself, appearing in the center of the altar. It broke through the marble and shot out twenty feet in height, casting itself over the entire church, pointing its evil lens in the direction of David and Jeremy. The debris-filled marble shot out toward their bodies, and it hit them fiercely, not really harming them, but bruising them a bit. This terrified them, the sight of this camera, knowing that, wherever they went, a video camera with a mysterious eye would see them, cheating at this unusual game. So they ran up to the altar and tried to destroy the camera by standing on the altar’s table and jumping up, trying to punch the camera down. As they punched it, taking turns, first David then Jeremy, David looked up at the big crucifix and noticed that there wasn’t a Jesus on that either. David stopped jumping and punching the camera, feeling the memories of that certain cross coming back to him, striking his fears, his forgotten memories, or suppressed nightmares, that flushed themselves toward David’s eyes. It caused disturbed emotions to be reconciled in his bones that froze his eyes as they gaped at the empty cross.
Jeremy saw David scanning something behind him, so he stopped jumping and punching at the camera, turned around to see what David was looking at in a haunting way, and came to the large crucifix that was hanging by two thin wires connected to the vast ceiling of the church. Once he saw the vacant cross, Jeremy heard David cry out, “Hey, that cross was the reason why I came to Grewsal!”
Jeremy and David stood on the altar’s table, and Sam jumped up on it as well, all staring at the naked cross of wood, and turning around at the same time to face the mysterious camera that stood in the air. All at once, they jumped up to the camera and started to punch it, sometimes missing it, and others striking it hard, but not hard enough to break it down. During their fight, they stretched their eyes toward the church’s doorway and fixed in on the closed doors that were being shaken by the angry mob outside.
“This isn’t working, it won’t bust,” David yelled, moving his eyes from the shaking doors and bringing them up toward the camera. David then fixed his eyes on the crucifix while Jeremy and Sam attempted to catch their breaths from all the jumping they did. “Oh my God,” said David in shock.
A cold, vague breeze came into the church’s stomach, blowing out some of the candles that gave light to their eyes, shifting their calmness to a height of trepidation as Jeremy and Sam heard what David said, and knew his eyes were fixed on the cross. Sam and Jeremy were too afraid to turn around and follow David’s stare, yet they did it anyway. First Jeremy turned and then Sam, looking at the cross in the half-darkened church, forcing Sam’s emotional state to make her say, “Oh my God!”
A fearful nature took over each of them, seeing a new man or creature that hung on the holy cross, resembling the cliché of the Jesus they believed in, hanging there as if he was dead from torture. It was an actual body, unlike the statues that are made to look real; this one was a human being. And for that, it hung gracefully from the cross, with newly made flesh wounds on his side, feet and forearms; rusted nails penetrated each of the wounds, and he hung silently in his own painful state. The cross began to shine, as if it wanted them to look at it, showing this man not exactly looking like Jesus, but someone else, another being that wasn’t in their consciousness. Every time the light shined brighter, each of them would get a better look at the man, perceiving he had long, black hair, pale white skin with a robe drenched in blood, and a crown of nails sheathed around his head of bloody textures.
“Guys, I think that’s…Jastian,” whispered Jeremy, closing in on the mysterious man’s closed eyes. Alone in the church, each of them gawked at this creature of torture when suddenly the eyes opened on the man who hung from the crucifix, and, once they did, Sam screamed so loud that she coughed up blood, still yelling in the process. The church started to shiver, trembling its body, vibrating its interior soul. Sam tried to catch her breath from her bloody coughs, wanting to scream again from the church’s nervous shaking. Candles started to fall, burning out from their massive drop, and statues began to break apart as the man on the cross pulled his hands and feet away from it, causing them to tear due to the nails that forced them to stay down like glue. On the altar’s table, Jeremy, Sam and David stood and watched in fright, a magnitude of nerves that choked their breath, inhaling this man’s evil that caused them to gasp for air, craving to escape this sight of sinister menace. Ripping his skin from the cross, Jeremy, Sam and David watched this man’s blood fall on them like a rain squall, a storm that splashed at their frozen flesh, and their eyes shut with force, not having any urge to see any more of this fear-provoking sight. In the distance, through the rickety church and windy momentum of air, stood three single candles that still were burning, and they prayed that the candles wouldn’t die, yearned for the nostalgic darkness that wanted to come never to show itself.
“You shall not end what I don’t want to be destroyed,” the man spoke in a massive echo. Jeremy, Sam and David jumped off the altar’s table right when this man, a creature of a spiritual realm, stepped down from the cross, standing tall on the altar with his enthralling face shining out radiance so bright that Jeremy, Sam and David couldn’t make out the creature’s image.
The three candles in the distance blew out, yet the brightness from this man took over the flames’ place. He was so radiant that Sam’s eyes began to water, stinging like salt was being poured into them. “Who are you?” yelled Jeremy through the pulsating light that the creature gave.
The man, or spirit, gaped at Jeremy’s eyes of tear-filled brown, answering, “I’m the second light, the second light that is known as an angel. I am Jastian, the Father of God!” Jastian’s arms hastily turned into snakes, large anacondas that stared at the three of them with their long, sharp, sultry tongues. Suddenly his entire body shot out snakes from it, and they hung from his pale, half-bloody flesh, and their venom-filled teeth tried to cut through Jeremy’s tissue that was soft and fragile from all the perspiration.
“If you are Jastian, then why do you show serpents for arms?” Sam screamed. Jastian stared at her and paused his snakes for a moment, watching her tears falling from her terrified eyes of beauty, smiling toward her fright. It was as if he was amused by her terror, a dogmatic, conniving, immortal creature with a fetish for serpents.
“Because your vicious acts show my eyes that you are evil, just like the serpents I wear. You boys were born by the saints, and now you will die by the saints,” roared Jastian. Unexpectedly, silence took over the church, with the trembling stopping and the serpents still pausing from their killing nature. A loud knocking boom was heard, and each of them turned around and faced the aisle of the church. There, to the right and left of the pews, were the statues of saints, opening their eyes. Sam started crying and yelling at the sight of a statue in front of her as it moved about and gazed at her beauty with a look of desire for carnage and butchery. She backed up so much that her body came into contact with another statue that was directly behind her, and it reached out for her, grabbing onto her shirt with its hand made of rusted stone. She moved her head around and saw the statue’s eyes bulging
out toward her, blood coming out from its sockets, forcing its eyes to appear even more.
She began screaming and pulled away, tearing her shirt and leaving the small piece in the statue’s marble hand. The other statue, which she saw first, released its hands from the same spot in which it was made, and grabbed onto her arms firmly, squeezing her flesh hard, brushing them while still holding on. “This isn’t real. Saints would not do this!” she yelled. Her tears fell to the altar floor, enthralled in the grip of the statue. Feeling the church begin to shake once again, her tears fell quicker to this sight, trembling down her fragile image with shock shooting into her spine like a blade. In the distance, which held many other statues, they detected them all moving out from the position they were sculpted in, and heading straight for the altar, straight for them, holding a kind of strange, sinister look to their eyes of black rock.
“These are not saints. My angels have possessed the statues you see before you. You allowed Jesus to leave the cross, and therefore you’ve allowed his spirit also to depart everything that is considered holy. My angels are unlike the angels you interpret in the half-fabricated existence you mortals call ‘the Bible of life’. My angels are evil, but only depraved to the ones in which the evil shines on. All of you hold malevolence, and you shall not obliterate this land, this place, this mass called ‘earth’. You shall be stopped.” Jastian chuckled; he laughed at how Sam fought to release the statue’s hands from her arms by biting it.
Wind began to form again, and Jastian started to rise off the ground and levitate in the consecrated air with his serpents slithering around his body, keeping their green and red eyes on David and Jeremy.
“Why are we evil? Your son? Your son, our God, was the one who wanted us to destroy this land. We only listen to God’s words. You’re not our God, and therefore we shall fight for our promise that we made to him,” hollered Jeremy. His words infuriated Jastian, so he shot a snake from his body, and it soared through the air, squealing and slithering before it hit Jeremy’s arm. The venomous teeth of the serpent broke through his skin, stabbed into his bone and pulled him toward Jastian’s body, just like a rag doll. Jeremy’s skin started ripping with the serpent lifting him upward toward Jastian’s glowing body. Screams shot out from Jeremy’s mouth, due to the pain from the serpent stinging at his flesh, bleeding down to his bones; it was too much for him to hold in. Jeremy came close enough to see through the light that shined off of Jastian’s face, and that’s when he screamed even more; not from the pain either. There, on Jastian’s face, Jeremy saw the beast, with long, curly, yellow horns that formed from its head and the beast’s face that held wrinkles that seemed like a labyrinth to Jeremy’s sight.
The Wrath of Jeremy Page 31