The site also warned of Navajo skinwalkers, Benjamin knew too well that they were also real but weren’t born travelers; they achieved it through the drinking of powerful herbs. They adorned themselves in animal skins and roamed the dimensions, seeking only to do evil… Benjamin had killed a few.
It listed eyewitness accounts of aliens and ghosts. Neither shocked him in the least. They were drawn to the earth’s energy. Then, finally, he found what he sought. His heart, for a moment, had hoped that Allan was full of shit, but it was there in old newspaper clippings and missing persons reports. One stated that an entire busload of missionaries had been abducted on the way to Mexico. they had been going to build churches for the less fortunate.
His skin rose into gooseflesh. The authorities denied the existence of a serial killer and instead blamed it on a handful of ramblers and truckers who frequented the lonesome stretch of road. They had no evidence to go on, only people who had never made it to their destinations.
He couldn’t deny how useless Allan had been in the past—nearly getting Benjamin killed—but the veteran traveler didn’t have it in him to abandon Allan, even though he probably deserved it.
He stepped into his house through the back door and grabbed a backpack out of the coat closet. He had a long drive ahead of him, which meant hours of buried memories plaguing his mind. Once he dug them all up Allan would be lucky if he stepped into the old man’s territory at all.
****
Casey awoke to being rolled onto her side. A mouthful of bile ran from her cheek.
“You are okay,” Javier said.
The morning sun hung over her. She had been lost in the spirit vine for many hours and felt weak and extremely sick.
“Ayúdame,” Javier said to the grandmother.
They eased Casey into a sitting position, then Javier helped her up onto her trembling legs to carry her inside the house. He laid her down on the couch and left her there for a moment to retrieve a pen and some paper.
“Describe it,” Javier said.
“I was shown who I really am,” Casey whispered, then began to recount the trip inside of her mind and spirit.
****
Casey was allowed to sleep a few hours until the old woman shook her awake. The grandmother threw a towel around her neck and dyed her hair a dark brown color. She spoke to Casey, but she didn’t understand it completely, so Javier translated.
“She said she’s sorry. It’s the hair color of an old woman, but it’s all she had to help keep your identity a secret.”
“Thank you,” Casey said.
The scent of the dye was obnoxious, souring her empty stomach. The thirty minutes it took to be finished was close to torture. Javier had his back to them as the grandmother combed the tangles from her newly darkened hair. He was busy looking for any leads from Casey’s vision. He used his cousin’s smart phone, leaving his turned off after racking up twenty missed calls by concerned friends and coworkers. He looked at his watch. His cousin would be home in an hour and he wanted to be long gone by then.
“We’re headed to southern Arizona,” Javier spoke. “You mentioned Stillwater. It was an asylum. It’s been shut down for years but it’s worth a look.”
The news had reported his abduction, a description of his car, and displayed his picture. He hoped the highway wouldn’t be closed. His grandmother handed over the keys to her station wagon. It was useless to her now that Javier’s cousin, Sylvia, cared for the old woman.
He felt a duty to guide Casey to the truth as the shaman many years before had done so for him, saving his life from the torment of addiction and schooling him in the mysteries of the ancient energies still alive in the modern world. He would do the same for the frightened girl, even if it killed him.
The old woman gathered supplies for their journey while Javier helped Casey into the car. Holding him by the wrist, his grandmother kissed his cheek as he leaned in for her to whisper into his ear, then sent him on his way. Casey watched the exchange, then fell asleep in the passenger seat before they even got out of the driveway.
****
The dog’s mouth was so close to taking his jaw off that Allan’s face became covered in a thick web of stringy slobber. He felt something roughly clamped around his ankle before Byron called the hound back.
“You ain’t dyin’ that easily,” he laughed as Allan trembled and pushed himself away from the dog, only to feel himself tethered by a heavy chain.
“You can’t do this,” Allan protested.
“Why not?” Byron asked.
“We have laws…”
“Does it look like I’m worried about those?” The old preacher asked.
Allan took a good look at his situation. The hollow faced women who hid on the opposite side of the church. The taint of death all around him. The massive beast with a black hide and powerful jaws just waiting for the signal to rip him apart.
“You’re in my realm now. You live by my laws, and you die by them too.”
“The others, the shadows, they will be drawn here like a magnet to our energy, by you and me,” he paused to look over at Celia who sat in a pew refusing to cower, “…and hers.”
“Let them come,” Byron said. “Are you afraid you might actually have to face one this time?” His old face split into a mocking grin, his crowded yellow teeth making it more sinister. “It would serve you right.”
He went to the church door. “I only wish they woulda killed Benjamin while you hid, that way you coulda heard them eating his heart out of his chest… pity that didn’t happen.”
Byron looked at his wrist watch, remembering that he promised to bring something worthwhile back to his brother, and that Betty would be waiting for him with dinner on the table.
“Maybe tonight, you’ll pay for leaving him to die,” Byron said.
He left the church while Allan struggled against the chain around his ankle, like a mouse caught in a trap.
****
Benjamin sped down the highway, taking the twists and turns without so much as a tap of his brake pedal. He had traveled those black roadways so many times that he could do it with his eyes closed. He cast his senses out wide. It was empty out there. Not another traveler, gifted or not, on that highway. He let his mind mull over the reasons Allan had decided to step into a potentially dangerous situation. Benjamin could only guess that Allan was feeling the weight of his guilt and cowardice. He had left Benjamin to fight off an entire horde of the shadow people. Benjamin bore scars on his chest to remind him of his old friend’s betrayal. Did his regret run so deeply he was willing to confront someone who he thought was a serial killer? He questioned if he should even care at all, but the accounts of so many innocents that vanished on that highway was something he couldn’t ignore.
“Tryin’ to play cowboy, Allan? You ain’t got it in you, you’re just lucky that I do,” he spoke out loud.
Allan and Byron had never seen eye to eye. They’d always had a pissing contest that Benjamin found irritating, but his disdain for the old man ran deep, coming from the preacher’s obvious shock that someone of color could be born with such a gift. He intended to show the old man he was born with more talents than stepping through doorways. He was also a skillful hunter and wasn’t shy to put evil in a grave. Benjamin just hoped Allan was strong enough to hold on this time. He knew that once Allan passed into the preacher’s territory he wouldn’t be allowed to run back out with his tail between his legs.
“Shoulda never let him go alone.” It was a sentence Benjamin repeated to himself as he sped along.
****
Byron bypassed the gateway. It was invisible to most, but it called powerfully to those born with the gift of traveling. He drove along a long dirt road stretching for miles through the desert on the other side, paralleling the highway in the real world. Remaining vigilant, he knew that the shadows would be drawn to the power within the church. Some might even be hungry enough to move during the daylight hours. He had fought them on a few occasion
s. They were strong, voracious hunters seeking the light and energy within the hearts of man, especially those gifted with the power to travel between the different planes.
There were wanderers with heroic souls, like Benjamin, who made it their mission to seek out and destroy the hungry shadows—but not Byron. He let them roam so long as they left him be. He could appreciate their primal need to kill, but he wouldn’t hesitate to dispatch them when they intruded on his sanctuary. It was the only place he could hide the truth about himself. It was something even his wife and twin brother never knew about.
It was a violence born into him.
He often wondered if he hadn’t been given every ounce of depravity in the womb, causing his brother to be born the gentlest soul to walk the face of the earth. Byron had stopped trying to fight his impulses when he was just a young man. The release he experienced was something to which no drug or orgasm could ever compare.
He had also hidden his urges from those who had shown him the way of the traveler. The older men who had felt the power to wander within Byron had never known that he would use his territory to play out his bloody fantasies… but they were all dead and gone now, and Byron refused to let a young wanderer like Allan ruin his true home, there amongst the blood and decay.
Being gifted would never make a man immortal, but Byron had always relished the feeling of getting to live two lives: one of an honest, hardworking man, the other a taker of lives and a punisher of those who were no more than the trash of humanity.
Travelers grew old and died like any other man. It was that thought that kept him killing well into his sixties. He would go out completely fulfilled in any world he stepped foot in.
He turned down a sandy, rutted wash. The car bounced as it crawled over smooth, flat stones the size of a child. It was completely impassable during heavy rain storms, but the clear, blue sky kept him confident that he could procure what he had come for and get back out without a problem.
Byron cursed himself—as he had many other times—for not keeping a truck in his territory. That way his old car wouldn’t get beat up driving down these dusty desert roads, but he found with each opportunity he couldn’t give up the old black car.
He exited the wash and drove up the other side of the embankment onto a small rise. Stopping atop the slope, he looked down into the small valley below. It was filled with dust covered cars and trucks in the center of which was a single yellow school bus. The sight of its rusted paint and broken windows stirred something within him, nostalgia for his younger days when his ultimate power had run free on both sides of the divide between the worlds.
His mortality became more apparent now as he looked down on his past conquests, his ultimate one gathering cobwebs among its empty seats. He recalled how powerful his hands had once looked gripping the steering wheel of his prized possession. Now they were spotted with age and trembled slightly at the power of the engine beneath the shining hood.
Byron never brought back all his loot. He kept most of it stashed here as a retirement plan of sorts. He had rings, watches, expensive sets of tools—all spoils of killing and raiding the cars and trucks of people moving between states and workers on their way to new sites.
On ordinary days in the real world, he did go on runs for his brother to collect antique furniture, porcelain dolls and sets of fine china, but the need to feel blood on his hands was something he could never ignore for long. His hoard in the desert valley assured him that he would have something to bring back to account for his time away. He even brought back baubles and trinkets to his wife, Betty. Most recently, he had taken number fourteen’s ring with the canary-yellow diamond and gifted it to her as an anniversary present.
His shelves were filled with tinker toys of children now buried in the desert on the other side. His wife’s closet sported a few coats from women who were long dead, slain by his own hands. These things kept Betty content and gave him wild fantasies of his days in the other desert, eliciting feelings of bloodlust and the need to return. He knew those sentiments were dangerous. The hungry shadows were once like him, travelers on the edge of losing themselves completely to the call of other dimensions, those with filthy souls seeking only destruction.
****
Byron drove down the hillside, creeping along like a black, steel wolf. He came to a stop among the broken-down cars with bloodstained seats and shattered windows.
He took a look around, making sure none of the shadows were breathing. At sixty-five years old, he still had the strength to defend himself, yet he was no fool when it came to the animalistic attacks of the corrupted ones. If they could overpower Benjamin, a man much younger and built like a grizzly bear, they could surely get the best of the old wanderer.
Byron took no chances. He flipped open his glove box on the dash of the car and grabbed the pistol he kept there. He stepped out of the car and quickly made his way to the bus on flattened tires. He slid the door open and stepped inside, where he was met by stifling heat and dust in the air. Suitcases were stacked up in the seats, filled with the trophies of those who had come to visit the church in the middle of nowhere.
The men, women and children, he remembered them all… the desperation in their eyes… the way their blood tasted. It stirred something in his groin. He grinned, strolling down the aisle. Running his fingertip over each suitcase, a sense of triumphant victory filled him with memories of his greatest conquest—something only a young hunter could have pulled off.
CHAPTER TEN
1966
“This is especially true of those who follow
the corrupt desire of the flesh and despise authority. Bold and arrogant, they are not
afraid to heap abuse on celestial beings.”
-2 Peter 2:10
Byron laughed as she dragged herself through the sand.
“Hot enough for ya?” he asked.
Her arms trembled as she fought to keep away from him. Blood ran into red trails behind her. The backs of her ankles yawned open like toothless mouths. He had cut the tendons there to keep her from running away, never guessing she had so much fight left in after the previous night, but she wouldn’t give up. The girl halted when stray pieces of cholla cactus got caught up in her sun dress.
“I bet that hurts,” Byron said.
He carefully picked up a piece of the cactus and dangled it over the back of her head. He let it fall, laughing as it got tangled in her blood-drenched blond hair. She reached back in an effort to pull it free, only to get it lodged in her shaking fingers.
He looked up at the sun overhead, sweat running down his back and forehead. He was growing bored with the game he was playing and the heat was making it lose its fun. Byron pulled the knife from his belt, then stood over her, grabbing her by the hair and taking care not to get any cholla in his hand. She screamed as he cut her throat. The blood pooled around her face as he laid her head down in it.
He didn’t worry much about hiding the corpse. They were in the other world, the one he had discovered he could step into when he was only eleven years old. It had always been easy for him, but for others it was not so simple. He thought about the travelers he had recently met, how they needed training to walk through the gateways, but to Byron, it was as natural as blinking his eyes.
He was in his territory now. It had been granted to him with the guarantee that no other wanderers would step foot there without an invitation from him, all in exchange for keeping the dark ones from reaching the doorway into the human world.
He found very few of the creatures there. Those he did find were feral stragglers, easily subdued and killed. Of course, ending their existence had never bothered him. It was like putting down sickly dogs to him. A simple shot to the head… a swift series of knife wounds… a few he even ran down with his car. It was entertaining, but it could never compare to the thrill of taking a human life.
Not by a long shot.
****
The bus sat on the side of the highway. The sight of it, cr
ippled by a blown tire, kick-started the blood lust in the exhausted hunter. A group stood in the dust and heat, fanning themselves with their hands and newspapers.
Byron smiled, then sped towards them, he glanced up into the rearview mirror making sure to slip on the mask of a helpful young man.
“Howdy. Do you need some help?” he hollered out the car window.
“And the Lord provides!” an older gentleman praised. “My name is Reverend Jim Larson. We would sure appreciate you givin’ us a hand.”
“Yes, sir!” Byron answered, then pulled ahead of the bus to park.
****
Reverend Jim felt the barrel of a gun pressed against his temple. The young man holding it there had the eyes of the Devil—absolutely remorseless. Byron had dropped the helpful passerby act as soon as the tire was fixed and had wasted no time in claiming the busload of missionaries as his next trophy.
“Drive, old man,” he instructed and the Reverend obeyed.
“You can have anything you want. Just don’t hurt anyone.”
“I said drive!”
Byron kept the gun against the preacher’s head while he eyed the terrified passengers. Their fear was palpable, body, sweat and tears. Young men and women, some barely out of childhood, their eyes wide, their minds praying to God that the man with the gun would let them live.
Their prayers went unanswered.
****
“Your reckoning will come. The wicked shall be punished by the Lord almighty. You shall find yourself in a land of brimstone, eternally feeling the heat of Hell’s fire,” Reverend Larson said.
His skin was blistered and split, his voice hollow in his parched mouth. Jim Larson cursed Byron daily, hoping that righteous vengeance would be something he would live to see, but somewhere in his heart he knew it wouldn’t be.
Those Who Follow Page 7