Burn (Story of CI #3)

by Rachel Moschell

  Cail squeezed her eyes shut against the tears that leaked down her cheeks. It actually felt like she might be about to black out from panic. She started to recite the list of Bible verses again, because even though she had gone through them over and over again tonight, the bloody image kept coming back.

  This couldn't really be from God. The pressure inside her felt like so many other times God had insisted she obey and do something, but this just couldn't be. God wouldn't ask her to kill Jonah.

  "For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts higher than your thoughts," said the voice in her head.

  I have always obeyed you, Lord, Cail sobbed into the carpet. But this can't be from you.

  She had to make it go away.

  She had made it go away before, through prayer and resisting the devil. Today would be the same.

  Cail staggered to her feet and brought the notebook that was hidden at the bottom of her desk drawer, then sat cross-legged on the carpet next to her Bible. She tried to calm her spirit before the Lord, but inside everything was on fire, burning up in a maelstrom of panic.

  She repeated the verses, said the right words to resist the devil by the blood of Jesus Christ. She said them many times in a row, in case she hadn't said it right. Then Cail opened her notebook and started drawing, on a clean, fresh page, directly after the last drawing. The page was clean and white, very unlike her heart. She needed to draw, but it was so hard to concentrate when she felt like she was so dirty, so putrefied and full of sin.

  Before she prayed about the violence she saw in her head, Cail was gonna have to pray and say the verses to purify her heart. That was the first step.

  It took another hour before she could start drawing. Even though her whole hand quivered, Cail was very good at drawing. She sketched Jonah with one cheek plastered against the wall. When she had these horrible thoughts, the way it happened was a little different every time. Sometimes she would kill him at the Jones' house, sometimes behind the church.

  It was always bloody.

  She didn't have to use her imagination for the picture she was sketching in the notebook, because the hellish scene was still in front of her eyes, making her want to puke. She drew the raw fear in Jonah’s eyes and the blood, because the more of the evil she could capture, the more she could resist the devil by blotting it all out, in the name of Jesus.

  Finally she was done drawing. Still shaking, Cail started to say the verses. She prayed over the red pen she would use to cancel it all out, getting the prayer just right by the tenth time. Then she carefully drew a big X over the sickening thing she had drawn, praying that God would cleanse her from the horrible thought and make all this go away.

  But it didn't work.

  Maybe she hadn’t made the X very well. The lines were looking a little bit crooked.

  But Cail had already done this twenty-two times today.

  She had drawn the picture and tried to make it go away by the word of God. What else was she supposed to do?

  This wasn't working.

  Right then she knew: this must be a very, very strong demon, trying to attack her and speak to her in a voice that sounded like God's. But why did the voice seem so much like the one she always heard, the one she knew as the Lord's?

  Right now it didn't matter. The panic was making it too hard to think.

  God needed her to be strong and courageous, to fight this in his power and strength. Crossing out a drawing in a notebook to cancel out the evil thoughts wasn't enough anymore.

  If she could just cancel out the violent thought for real, not just on paper, she was sure it would go away.

  Or at least it felt that way.

  Head spinning, Cail changed into a corduroy navy blue skirt and a black sweater. There was a black beret on her dresser and she wadded her butt-length blond hair up in a bun and covered it with the hat. She pulled on tall black boots and entered the combination to her gun safe in the corner of her room. She saw her rifle case resting there but immediately rejected the idea. This demon had to be faced eye to eye.

  Cail grabbed the M1911 pistol, loaded it, then packed it into a backpack. She snuck downstairs and out of the house, easy to do since the rest of her family was at church.

  It made the panic grow even more to realize she was missing church tonight, but she’d had to stay home because of the headache. And the panic.

  There must be a lot of praying going on right now, though, with everyone at Sunday night church. Cail felt a little bit relieved. All the prayers going up into the heavens would make things easier for her. Everyone knew that prayers made the demons weak.

  She could almost see the glowing angels watching her from the side of the road, arms crossed and nodding with approval as she went off to battle the devil. Maybe tonight the battle would be won. She would be free to serve the Lord in peace.

  Cail barely noticed a thing on the seven-block walk to the Jones' house. The smurf-blue two-story was mostly quiet. Of course the Joneses would also be at church. She knew Jonah wouldn't be, though. He'd told her himself when she asked him at the service this morning.

  The poor boy was still living like a pagan.

  Doubt pinched at her again. Could the urges to kill him be from the Lord? Because maybe this was all just Jonah's punishment for rejecting God?

  No.

  She was going to finish this.

  She would not allow these evil thoughts to control her anymore.

  Cail followed the amber glow of light to one of the den windows. She peeped over the sill and felt her heart melt. Jonah had stayed home from church and was sprawled on the couch, asleep under his mom's yellow afghan. Some stupid show was on with half-naked people singing on a stage with magenta and lilac lights. Jonah's lashes rested on his cheeks and his wire-rim glasses were on the coffee table. One of his hands had fallen open and was trailing to the floor. The remote control had tumbled onto the braided rug.

  Once Cail got the victory over the devil in this, God was going to work to bring her and Jonah together. Something in her heart surged, as she realized that this was the key.

  She loved him so much.

  The panic attacked a thousand fold. Cail suddenly couldn't breathe. Because now she was here, at Jonah's house, looking at him a few feet away through the glass. And in her hand was the M1911. It was loaded.

  She could kill him.

  There was no way she would kill him!

  She loved Jonah Jones.

  This was just a test. She had to cancel the thoughts all out, and they would go away. The battle would be won.

  Cail slipped silently through the grass to the oak front door, catching a glimpse of her dark reflection in the beveled glass panel. She turned the knob, knew exactly how to slide the door over the faded carpet so that it wouldn't squeak. She had spent so much time here.

  She was inside. Cail hurried silently across the entryway and dining room towards the den, pretty sure the rest of the Joneses were at church but not wanting to make any noise just in case. She knew her face must be pale as the moonlight outside. Her black shirt clung to her spine, slick with sweat. Her heart slammed against her chest, demanding to get out.

  This was the part where she killed him.

  Cail fought a choking noise and glanced at her arm in horror, afraid she would see the dark red blood and Jonah's brains all over the wall.

  No!

  She would make it go away.

  "Greater is he that is in me, than he that is in the world." She repeated it under her breath, many times, standing there in the dark entryway, around the corner from where Jonah napped on the couch. Then she went on to the next verse. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and clamped her fingers around the pistol and said the right prayer, so the demons would have to go away and the awful idea that she could kill Jonah would be erased from her mind.

  Using God's word and the blood of Jesus she cleansed her mind from the whole thing.

  Cail lost
all track of time.

  Until she heard the word, "Police!"

  She really didn't want to stop. She wasn't done yet and the panic was still there. But there were people yelling and someone repeated police. She opened her eyes and nearly swooned, trying to understand the scene around her.

  She was on the couch, the itchy orange and green plaid one in the Joneses' den. She was sitting on one knee, and the M1911, the one that killed Jonah in every nightmarish scene that played through her head, she was gripping that pistol with knuckles as white as clay, pressing it against Jonah's temple.

  Jonah was on his back under the afghan, breath shallow, quivering under the steel against his temple, blue slits for eyes.

  "Police!" the deep voice came a thousand times louder now, shaking the very timbers of the house. They were behind her in the entryway. "Drop your weapon!"

  Cail dropped the pistol with a thunk to the braided rug and passed out on top of Jonah.

  Prince Charming

  WARA WAS IN A DAZE BY THE time they got to Timbuktu. Mercifully, she’d dropped off to sleep against the passenger side door of the Land Cruiser, just about the time the desert turned pitch black. Lázaro must have kept himself awake with his light jazz all night, because by the time Wara jerked awake they weren’t far away from Timbuktu and it was dawn.

  Lázaro skirted the normal entrance into the city, driving in a direction Wara had never been. What they hit a clearing, what she saw left her mouth hanging open.

  There was a palace. Made of sandy bricks. It had turrets and Arabic-style towers and the sun was blazing pink as a backdrop to the whole thing.

  Lázaro drove closer to the palace, stopped the Land Cruiser and honked once. They waited there in the sand and Wara kept staring. Closer up, she could see that the place was falling apart. Chunks of castle were missing, maybe taken out by mortars. Dunes had crept up the sides of the palace.

  A rusting metal door heaved open and Lázaro drove the Land Cruiser inside the mud brick wall. Wara saw a couple AQIM fighters waiting inside the courtyard and felt sick to her stomach.

  Lázaro worked with these guys.

  He wanted to hand Lalo and Cail over to them.

  She was tired, much too tired to think what Lázaro was going to do to her. He had mentioned her leaving this place with him and the millions he was going to make selling her friends to terrorists.

  She had made the choice to be with him, long ago and now. She’d tried to help her friends and warn them about Lázaro’s plans, but that hadn’t gone well at all.

  Wara squeezed her eyes shut and hunched down in the seat as they drove past the warriors in loose shirts and turbans. Everyone had an AK47 slung over one shoulder and the weapons glinted in the fierce dawn. The men all gawked at her through the Land Cruiser window, grinning and leering.

  “We made it, dear,” Lázaro said. His hair stuck up everywhere and his eyes were positively bloodshot. “Stick by me, now. Compared to these guys, I’m Prince Charming.”

  Lázaro jumped out of the vehicle and marched around to her side, ripped the passenger door open. Wara felt all the moisture on her tongue evaporate as the AQIM warriors tried to crowd in. She kept her eyes on the sand and Lázaro’s boots. Inside the hood of her jade top, Wara was shaking.

  Lázaro yelled at the other men in Arabic, told them to shut up and get back to work. “If anyone touches this woman, I will personally make them suffer,” Lázaro barked. Wara flicked her eyes up to see actual fear stamping itself across the bearded faces that a minute ago wore lust. She did not want to think what these men had seen Lázaro do that had them so afraid.

  Lázaro gripped Wara by the elbow and marched her across a courtyard littered with discarded shoes, chicken bones, and empty sardine cans. They passed through an archway and into a huge room, cavernous and rosy with the remains of watermelon-colored paint.

  “I don’t know if you can imagine it,” Lázaro told her, stopping in the middle of the floor and gawking at the ceiling like a tourist. He unsnapped his fingers from Wara’s elbow, leaving five round red marks. “This place,” Lázaro said, “used to be beautiful. This was the men’s sitting room. It had a golden fountain, there.” Lázaro pointed cheerfully to a hunk of concrete at the center of the room. “Everything would have been filled with brocade pillows and marble and solid gold. See, right there on the wall? You can still make out a statue of a lion. Gold’s been stripped off, though.”

  “What is this place?” All the information Wara had read about Timbuktu’s history and rulers seemed to be checked out of the library in her brain at the moment. Whatever great king used to live here, it looked like years of desert and looters had left nothing of value.

  Lázaro cocked his head at her and moved to take a step closer. With no warning, his leg doubled under him and Lázaro staggered, pitched unsteadily towards the floor. He caught himself before Wara could even react, grabbing a pillar and trying to smooth out the pain rippling across his face.

  The drugs were wearing off. And Lázaro wasn’t getting any more until he finished the kids and Wara. Or sold Lalo for money to get the drugs himself.

  Lázaro forced himself to smile and pretend everything was just fine, even though he was wheezing and his fingers had a death grip on the pillar. “This, my dear, was one of Qaddafi’s palaces,” he said. “Of course the palaces they found in Libya after his regime fell were a thousand times grander than this. But I suppose this palace was beautiful, too, in its day. I wasn’t here, then.”

  Lázaro gritted his teeth and took a deep breath, then motioned towards a huge set of double doors at the end of the pink sitting room. “I have the only key to open the doors to that room,” Lázaro said. “I have some things to do now, and I’ll have to leave you here, just for a little while. You heard me threaten the men. They won’t touch you.”

  He marched her through the doors into a smaller room and forced her into a battered wooden chair. “I’ll put the zip ties on in front,” he said briskly. “Since you told me about your misadventure in Iran. Just in case you are one to get out of ties, just remember that I’m sure all of AQIM will be lurking just outside the door. You don’t want them to get ahold of you. You’re safer in here, waiting for me.”

  He grabbed her wrists and forced them together, wrapped zip ties around them and pulled them shut. It felt horrible to not have use of her hands. Wara felt weak, vulnerable.

  And confused that Lázaro remembered what she’d said yesterday about her shoulder pain and Iran.

  Lázaro observed the zip ties with satisfaction. “I don’t suppose you want to tell me what happened in Iran? Another educational trip, volunteering overseas with ammo?”

  Wara blinked at him. “Nope. I don’t suppose I do.”

  Lázaro leaned against a pillar and crossed his arms in front of him. “It sucks to be in pain all the time, though. Doesn’t it? You said it’s your shoulders?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I suppose that was the reverse hanging, then. They love doing that in prison in Iran. Did you tell them what they wanted to know?”

  Wara felt the burn spreading from her restrained wrists up to her shoulder blades. “No. I would have, but Alejo got me out of there before they strung me up again,” she said hollowly.

  “See, we do understand each other. In some small way,” Lázaro said with a crooked half-smile. “I’m sure you’ve found out for yourself how being in pain all the time can put one in a bad, bad mood. Well then,” he grinned. “I shall return.” Lázaro smacked a kiss onto her cheek and whirled towards the door, almost stumbling again.

  He had kissed her.

  She heard him grinding a key in the ancient padlock and the heavy wood doors were sealed shut, locking her in and the terrorists and their AK47s out.

  It seemed like forever that she sat there behind the doors, eyes wandering in a daze. This room had splotches of yellow paint, and it didn’t seem nearly as grand as the other room. Maybe this was once the women’s sitting room. Now it seemed l
ike AQIM used it for storage. There were boxes laced with dust in the corners and not much else. The windows were nothing more than exaggerated mail slots, high up along the twenty-foot ceilings. Maybe so no one could peek in and catch a glimpse of Qaddafi’s harem.

  There was no escaping here. And Lázaro was right: she didn’t want to. Wara could hear the men shuffling around outside the double doors, snickering and yelling things she couldn’t quite catch in Arabic.

  She walked around the room for a while, jerkily because her hands were tied together. Lázaro hadn’t made the zip ties too tight, but it still made her shoulders nice and sore. The only place to sit was on the old chair, because the floor was covered with shards of broken glass. Glossy white scorpions cruised around, dipping in and out of the ancient boxes.

  Wara really hated scorpions.

  She flopped back into the chair and curled over as best she could into a ball. She was so, so far away from home, and still confused at how she had gotten here so quickly.

  She hadn’t wanted anyone to die, because in some way, all of this was her fault. She hadn’t wanted to really think about it, because that meant realizing Lázaro was gonna die. But in the end, when she saw the pistol against the back of Lázaro’s head, she’d done whatever she had to to save him.

  And that meant hurting Alejo. She had hurt him so badly, and if she ever saw him again, he would hate her.

  But at the river, you tried to warn Cail about the bomb at the hospital, about Lázaro’s plans for Lalo.

  Wara couldn’t deny thinking about Lázaro dying had been awful. She couldn’t lie to herself and pretend she didn’t give a crap about him after their past together.

  But that doesn’t mean you are joined to him forever.

  Wara blinked in the dusty air, trying to push away the mess of cobwebs inside her brain.

  What you did in the past doesn’t have to control what you decide to do now.

  You can let it go and move on.

  The thought was so clear that it made her shiver.

  Really? She would love to let it go and move on. But she was literally tied up, stuck in this situation with no escape route. Even if there was an escape route, no one from her old life wanted her back.