It would be forever, she knew, until she aged and grew old as her Memaw. A life sentence.
“Well?” John squeezed again.
Bobby yelped. Weak now, nearly limp, dangling, clenched in John’s powerful hand.
Luna closed her eyes.
“Yes,” she said.
John smiled, triumphantly. Turning away from her, he moved toward the window.
“Wait!” she yelled.
He ignored her. Twisting, John hurled Bobby through the broken glass, the furry beast disappearing out into the night sky.
“You said—”
“He’ll live.”
In the sudden quiet, Luna heard weeping near a corner. They both turned. A robed sullen man was cradling the woman who had given birth, rocking with her in his arms. Whispering sobs and moaning. The woman was white as a ghost. Limp. And unmoving.
John came to her and untied her bonds.
“Thanks,” she said, unable to take her gaze from the couple.
“We should go,” he said, following her eyes. His voice stoic and matter of fact.
“One last thing.” Luna moved toward the fireplace.
John watched her and nodded as she gestured to the last burning log. He came and fetched the wood, the heat smoldering against his hand. He tossed the glowing orange and yellow ember branch to an overturned table. The cloth ignited. Flames grew. Curtains caught fire. Smoke rose.
Luna started for the man holding the woman in the corner.
“Leave them.” John stood by the door. Removing enough bodies to give them safe passage.
Gazing at the couple, Luna nodded grimly.
John opened the door. “Time to go home.”
Chapter 37
Daybreak
Bobby
“Hey, pal. You alive?”
Some voice, distant, like an echo carried across a long empty corridor. And cold. Freezing cold. Slowly, Bobby Weeks opened his eyes. The world was miserably bright. New morning. New day. A portly looking fellow, forty-ish with reddish brown hair and an equally appalling mustache lying flaccid just beneath a bulb-like cherry-red nose was looking down at him nervously. Baton in hand, clipboard in the other, prodding him in the ribs. He wore a greyish looking uniform with a small badge on his big breasted chest.
“Where am I?” Bobby sat up, shivering and wet. The ground was covered with frozen grass on a lawn that seemed to go on forever. Sirens roared in the distance. And the smell of burnt wood and smog. He was naked, except blessedly for pants. Jeans, torn and ripped, but still keeping him from being exposed.
“Jesus, buddy. I thought you were dead. You’re at the university, on the far east end. No one really comes out here but me. I come out here on my checks. Say, where you in there?” The guard gestured to a building on the far side of the lawn.
“There?”
“The school.”
Bobby shielded his eyes from the morning sun, his vision blurring and then returning. In what felt like a mile away, the large Masonic castle of Baelo University had nothing of its former glory. Now all that remained was soot stained brick and stone and charred black broken beams of wood. Two red fire engines glimmered in the distance. Still soaking the smoldering embers and ash with streams of water bellowing chalky white smoke into the grey yellow sky.
The school…
Luna…!
Bobby snatched the guard, balling the man’s shirt in his fists.
“Hey, what’s your problem?” the guard moaned, panic growing in his eyes.
“Was there anyone in there? Have they found anyone?” Luna was in there. And all those people, the cultists. And the tall man with the bear mask. And the pregnant woman. Oh god, what happened in there? What did I do? What did I do?
“Yes. Afraid so.” The guard lowered his head. Sullen. “Hard to say how many, but Jotham Fire and Rescue has pulled out a dozen so far from the wreckage.”
“Dead…?”
The guard nodded. Head low.
“Dead.” Bobby released the guard, staring into palms. Hadn’t they been wounded? Memory shattered. All that remained were flash images. The gathering. The party. And the tall man with the bear skinned mask. A woman had given birth. Some kind of ritual. And his crucifixion. Silver spikes and pain. And Luna. Luna was there. They had her bound and…someone had struck her. She asked him, she asked Bobby to let the wolf out. But not with words. She spoke into his mind. He didn’t want to change. But she begged. And he obeyed.
Still on the grass, Bobby began to weep.
“I know. Pretty tragic. My shift ended a couple hours ago, but it don’t seem right leaving, you know? Thought I’d stay on, at least until EMS and fire department clear the scene. See what the total is. Sure folks in town will be wanting to know what happened. God awful, if you ask me.” The guard hitched his thumbs in his patrol belt, his gaze lingering on the smoldering school.
On wobbling legs, Bobby stood, swaying on numb feet. He looked at the school one last time and turned to leave.
“Where you going, the cops are gonna have some questions. You were there, right? Why else would you be out in the grass nearly in your birthday suit. Suppose the fire knocked you way out here. Not sure how you survived, but not like it matters, they’re still gonna want to talk with you.” The guard walked after him, huffing, becoming quickly out of breath.
“I don’t care.” Bobby limped on, making his way to the east end entrance.
“What?”
“I don’t care. I can’t stay here.”
“All right, but if someone asks, you took off running, okay?”
“Sure.”
“You didn’t start the fire, did you?”
“No.”
“Okay then. I’ll take your word for it. You don’t look much like an arsonist. Not to me, anyway. You sure you don’t want to talk with one the investigators?”
“Nope.”
“All right.”
“You don’t happen to have some spare clothes, do you? Something I can put on?” Bobby stopped and turned to the guard. Arms crossed over his chest. Shivering with each fog laced breath. Bones hollow. Muscle tight and worn.
“Clothes?” The guard looked him over. “Yeah, I suppose I got something. Can’t say it’ll fit your scrawny butt, but I suppose it’ll be better than nothing.”
***
In the back of the guards Ford Escape, near the east entrance, Bobby put on a pair of jogging pants, a Baelo University sweatshirt, and running sneakers of some brand he was not readily familiar with. The clothes fit, but as he expected, they were baggy. But they were also warm and only slightly used too. More than he could have expected. And twice what he deserved. Especially from a stranger who found him near frozen out in the lawn outside a burnt down school. The crime of a century, for a small town like Jotham.
“Wife’s been after me about working out. Guess you can see, hasn’t really stuck yet.” The guard was laughing lightly, his fat cheeks rosy in the bitter wind that’d come in from the west. He looked uneasily from Bobby and back to the charred school.
“Thank you…” Bobby started.
“Oh. Tim. Tim Pullman,” the guard answered hastily.
“Thank you, Tim.”
“Sure.” Tim pulled on his utility belt, turning down the volume on his walkie-talkie. Some woman, by the sound of it, was squawking about shutting down the east entrance.
Bobby turned and looked at the east end gate, still open. “Guess I better get going.”
“What happened?” Tim blurted.
“Huh?”
“In there.” The guard gestured to the still smoldering school.
Bobby looked out over the expansive yard, at the bones of the last place he recalled seeing Luna.
“You don’t have to, if you don’t want.” Tim shuffled his feet.
Bobby shrugged. “Not sure what to say. Don’t remember much.”
“Sure. Okay.” Tim started off.
Watching the hefty guard walk away, Bobby shouted, “It was
n’t good.”
Tim turned back. “Huh?”
Gesturing to the school. “Whatever happened in there, it wasn’t good. The school wasn’t what it looked like. Something terrible happened in there. The people in there, they poisoned the place. A cult, I think.”
“Jesus. A cult?”
“Be careful. This town isn’t right.”
Tim’s shocked demeanor faded into a giggle, puffing white smoke with his breath. “Sure, mister. This is Jotham, Best Littlest Place in Texas. What could go wrong here?”
Bobby nodded, watching as Tim started back towards the flashing lights and huddled red fire engines and hordes of reporters with cameras and notepads and questions no one could answer.
Someone, the woman on the radio no doubt, set the east end gate in motion. Bobby ran out just as it closed shut. He turned back, one last time, and gazed at the school. Ruined. He prayed Luna had made it out, somehow.
Careful not to be spotted, he followed the wall to the front end of the university entrance. Near the guard station, the small brown box, the black iron gates were open, and just beyond that, all the ruckus and attention he wanted to avoid. Creeping along the brink and stone, he spotted Luna’s grandfather’s Fatboy, still hidden behind the shrubs.
Quietly and quickly as he could, Bobby pulled the motorcycle back on the road, opposite of all the commotion. He threw his legs over the saddle and kick fired the engine. The pipes roared and rattled, but kept its growling breath.
Giving one final look over his shoulder, Bobby turned the accelerator and let off the clutch. The Harley spewed gravel and screamed and burned down the road, taking Bobby Weeks far, far away from Baelo University.
Chapter 38
Accipiendo Fatum
Luna
The swing on her grandmother’s porch at her cabin in the woods moaned as she swung slowly back and forth. Wrapped in a thick purple and pink afghan blanket, Luna gazed out into the Delta woods, not really seeing the pines and elm, but rather, the image in her mind, the image of Bobby Weeks eating alone at some diner on the outskirts of Kisatchie National Forest in Louisiana. She could taste the Fatburger, the bacon and cheese curded and fried egg heart attack waiting to happen. She could sense his emotional tug of war between urgency and solace. Urgency in finding some girl named Jo Harwood. And of the moon. But also solace, acceptance of his place in the reality of things.
He was cursed.
Couldn’t do a damn thing about it now.
His friends had died.
He survived.
And would continue to survive.
Why?
Simply enough, the girl needed him.
And the world is certainly a place worth living in when you have someone who needs you. Luna smiled at the image. And of her once-upon-a-time lover’s thoughts. Did he know she was there, peeking into his mind? Doubtful. In the last month since returning from Baelo University with the Sad Man known as John Turner, her abilities had sharpened in her seclusion. And now, word of her has spread to the destitute and desperate people residing in the Delta, or as her grandmother had often refereed, the bubble out of time. Those seeking answers. Some guidance. In the end, it seemed Memaw’s wish had come true.
Luna had become the woman in the woods, as the old woman had been before her, and her mother’s mother before her, and so on.
And what of John Turner?
He came.
When he felt he was needed.
But otherwise, kept a comfortable distance from the cabin. Never far.
And of Bobby Weeks?
Luna pressed farther, past his mind and into his future. Images of stretches and miles and miles of black pavement. He would continue searching for Jo. And he would eventually find her, in a town with a giant illuminated star perched on top a mountain, at a coffee shop called Sweet Donkey in a town known fondly by the locals as The Noke.
He would find her and explain to her who he was.
Jo would hate him for a time, but only for a time.
And what of herself? What would come of Luna Blanche?
Inside the cabin, the kettle on the stove began to scream. Smiling, Luna jumped from the swing. She opened the door perhaps daring not to peer into her own fate. Content to accept things as they were and for what they could be. At the table, she poured her tea and returned to the swing outside. Above the pines the clouds turned dark. Thunder boomed not far away, chasing off the birds that’d come out to play. She looked at the rolling ink with suspension, sipping from her mug. Wondering again of her own future she whispered, “We’ll see.”
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Acknowledgments
To my friends and family and readers and those who volunteered to be put into the story. I am very thankful for your continued support and a little disturbed by how so many wanted to die gruesomely.
About the Author
Thomas S. Flowers is the published author of several character driven stories of dark fiction. He resides in Houston, Texas, with his wife and daughter. He is published with The Sinister Horror Company’s horror anthology The Black Room Manuscripts. His debut novel, Reinheit, is published with Shadow Work Publishing, along with The Incredible Zilch Von Whitstein and Apocalypse Meow. His military/paranormal thriller series, The Subdue Series, both Dwelling and Emerging and Conceiving, are published with Limitless Publishing, LLC. In 2008, he was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army where he served for seven years, with three tours serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom. In 2014, Thomas graduated from University of Houston Clear Lake with a BA in History. He blogs at machinemean[dot]org, where he does reviews on a wide range of strange yet oddly related topics.
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Conceiving (Subdue Book 3) Page 25