by Ninie Hammon
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Just don’t hurt Emily and Andi.”
“And you know where Becca is, could lead me right to her, do you?”
Daniel scrambled for something to say to make the lie more convincing.
“Of course, I know where she is. Do you think Jack and I intend to go after your ‘boss’ alone, only the two of us, without the ‘one who comes with the light?’”
Victor made a sound unlike any sound Daniel had ever heard before, an inarticulate cry of rage and frustration and…yes, fear.
“Noooo. You won’t get the chance this time.”
“Are you sure of that?” Daniel was saying anything he could think of to distract Victor from his five-minute deadline.
He careened his Suburban across three lanes of traffic to the interstate off ramp, thundered down Belmont Street and screeched a right turn. The turn was wide and for a horrifying moment, he was staring into the eyes of a stunned driver coming right at him. But he pulled back into his own lane just in time and pushed his foot to the floorboard.
“I don’t think you are sure,” he told Victor. “I don’t think your boss is sure, either. We already beat him once, you know.”
“You won’t live long enough to come into his presence ever again, none of you!” the voice roared, but it didn’t sound like Victor’s voice anymore. It was deeper, throaty and ragged, the voice of a man who has swallowed gravel. Or of a creature that wasn’t a man at all.
“You might be able to stop Jack and me. You know where we are. But you don’t know where Becca is. You aren’t sure she’s not going to show up someday at…”
Where? Daniel had no idea where the creature was.
Then an image, a memory exploded into his consciousness, was propelled out of the shadows in his mind with such force it shook his vision. He recalled what Theresa had said.
“Maybe they’s somebody wants you to remember. Somebody’s stronger than what made you forget.”
He is in a place that defines darkness, that produces darkness the way a lantern produces light. A dry hissing, rattling sound fills his ears and a musty, old-place smell fills his nostrils. But there’s a more putrid stench beneath. He can sense it there. Like pus in a boil about to burst, the stench and foulness is only contained by a thin membrane, and to break that membrane is to be totally overwhelmed by the rotting evil it’s holding back.
There is a heaviness here, as if the darkness has weight and substance. To move through it requires plowing through something almost solid. It weighs down on Daniel’s shoulders so he feels he might be crushed beneath it, like he’s holding up something huge and ponderous, a black thing whose size is immeasurable, its bulk unfathomable. He is a speck, a fleck of dust beneath it.
Every step forward requires way more than human strength. Not even Bishop, as strong as he is, could have passed through this corridor without Becca’s light. It holds the darkness at bay. Like snarling wolves, the blackness crouches at the edges of the light, ready to pounce. But the illumination coming from the small, frail child beside him cuts the blackness, a scythe through wheat.
He knows, but does not know how he knows, that to stumble, to trip and fall outside the light is to be instantly devoured by the darkness. The darkness hates, too. He can feel the ferocity of the hatred and it almost stops his breathing. The darkness hates him, hates life of any kind, but mostly hates Becca.
The two of them are huddled close, walking down some sort of tunnel, and Daniel suspects that someone seeing the scene from outside would see nothing more sinister than two children walking together, a slender girl and a hulking boy by her side, a boy who’d come to defend her, cringing under her umbrella of protection.
Thoughts appear in his mind, put there by a Daniel he barely knows who is all things foul—cowardly and lustful and angry. He recognizes that Daniel, though he’s pretended his whole life not to hear what it whispers in his ear.
“Run!” that Daniel’s voice cries in his head. “Get out while you still can.”
And oh, how Daniel wants to run, to race screaming back into the world where light lives, to feel the sun on his face and breathe the warm summer air.
He glances back over his shoulder, hoping to see a retreating circle of brightness behind them marking the way out. It’s not there, but what is there freezes his heart. He almost stumbles from horror, but if he falls he will not be gobbled up by the darkness. He’ll be devoured, eaten alive by what now fills the whole cavern they have just passed through.
Snakes.
And spiders.
Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. A solid, tangled mass of horror that blots out the floor.
The snakes slither along, so many they’re twisted and snarled together, every one deadly—diamondbacks, sidewinders, timber rattlers, copperheads, cotton mouths and water moccasins. They are the source of the hiss and rattle he heard but couldn’t identify. The bite of even one would mean instant death and there are untold hundreds of them. The snakes stay just beyond the light, visible only in the ambience of its glow. They form a rug knit together with clots of wriggling spiders. Brown recluse spiders, hobo spiders and—
And black widows.
The memory was suddenly gone, popped into nothingness, and Daniel was again in a world of light and a different kind of horror. But the truth the memory had spoken to him filled his whole soul. That was why. A monster from that ever-darkness had killed his baby sister. What he thought he’d imagined was real. The spider did turn and look at him before it bit her.
“…still there, Daniel? Don’t you hang up on me. I’m gonna make two dead bodies if—”
“I didn’t hang up!” Daniel tried to keep the desperation out of his voice but couldn’t. “I didn’t. I just…I’m driving so fast I needed both hands on the wheel.”
“You better be driving fast. You only got a little over two minutes now.”
Daniel was driving like a wild man—and not a police officer in sight! He’d heard sirens earlier, some kind of emergency. Where had they all gone?
“No, wait! I said I’d tell you where Becca is if—”
“And you’re the worst liar I ever heard. I ain’t gonna get it out of you that easy. But just ’cause you’re being so cooperative, I’m gonna give you a choice. You get to decide who I kill.”
“Kill? You said I still had—”
“I lied! Wanted to get you here quick without you getting the bright idea to stop off somewhere on the way and gather up some county mounties. Three’s too many hostages to handle. Only need two. You get to pick which. Who dies—your wife or your daughter?”
* * * * * * *
The warehouse was empty, evacuated because of the fire. Obviously, workers had leapt up, dropped whatever they were doing and run. A forklift sat in the middle aisle with the motor idling. The door on the elevator beneath the racks of whiskey barrels thirty feet to his left sat open and the barrel wagon was backed up to it, with the back gate off and rails attached.
Another barrel wagon had been abandoned at the far end of the warehouse near the loading dock and another forklift sat driver-less there, too.
Jack stood panting for a moment. He’d done his best to conserve it, but his own strength was about spent. He didn’t have a demon riding his coattail amplifying the affect, but Jack was dealing with adrenaline fatigue, too. He’d been fighting for his life and now his muscles were trembling from the effort.
Whump!
Cole was throwing himself at the metal door, apparently intent on battering it down with brute force.
Go for it, big guy!
There was another whump, and this time splinters flew away from where the bolts affixed the metal door frame in the wooden opening. Cole might not be able to shatter the metal door, but he could knock it out of the wall!
Jack looked around. He was too tired to keep running. He needed a weapon, something to use as a club, maybe, but he saw nothing. Where could he go?
Whump!
&nbs
p; Splinters and shards of wood came loose this time. Another couple of good hits…
Jack’s scanning eyes landed on a narrow ladder that led up the side of the barrel racks to his left. Cole couldn’t negotiate a ladder with only one functioning hand. Jack leapt up the old wood rungs, climbed to the second rack, about fifteen feet off the floor and edged along the railing.
The door jamb finally gave way and Cole crashed into the building with the door and frame.
The man lay on the door where it had fallen, panting, then staggered to his feet. Throwing himself at the metal door had apparently dislocated his right shoulder, so now that whole side of his body was useless, with the arm bone out of its socket and the bones below the elbow shattered. The side and front of his shirt and his pants were soaked in blood from the compound fracture.
Jack called out to him, taunting. “The stairs are that way.” He pointed to the other end of the building.
By the time Cole got to the stairs and up them, Jack would be gone.
Jack clambered along the railing toward the barrel wagon that had been left there ready to be unloaded. Cole tracked with him, staying just below him. Suddenly, a piece of the railing Jack had just grasped came loose in his hand. He was off balance and so tired his reflexes weren’t fast enough to catch him. He took one final, desperate grasp at the railing, and missed. Then he was falling and the world went dark.
There is a light ahead that spills around the corner of a tunnel, but it isn’t a warm glow like the light that radiates around Becca. This light is harsh, bright desert sun that burns your skin and parches your throat so your tongue swells up in your mouth.
This light is the color of old blood. The darkness recedes from it, a viscous black liquid that shines dully in the harsh red glow.
Jack is so tired he would have dropped to his knees if they weren’t holding him up, Cole on one side, Victor on the other. The air itself resists Jack’s passage, though the others glide through it with ease.
Jack’s senses are numb with a kind of terror that defies all reason. An empty, alone horror that totally isolates him. His inner being is utterly solitary, cut off from all life and light, lying naked in a dark that is more than merely the absence of light—a dark that is itself a being, a life form of pure evil.
The harsh light shoves back the gelatinous darkness in the tunnel as they approach a bend in the shaft, and Jack suddenly realizes that he must not go around that corner, that he cannot face whatever it is that’s on the other side. But even if he could get out of Cole and Victor’s grasp, the air is too thick for movement. He can’t run through it, can only stagger forward.
When the three step as one around the corner toward the light, Jack is frozen with shock and the other boys stop when he does. What lies before them cannot be. It is too big to fit in the confines of any room, a lake that stretches out in every direction as far as they can see, receding into the distance where a pewter sky is stitched to the horizon by tendrils of smoke the color of ashes.
It is not a lake of water. It is a lake of liquid fire where flames lick up off the tips of waves like foam on surf.
Jack’s legs give way. The two other boys let him collapse to the ground, drag him forward across a black line spray-painted on the smooth white stone and dump him there.
Then Jack hears is. Smells it. He cringes away even as he feels his chin begin to rise up off his chest. He makes no voluntary movement to lift it, but it rises all the same. His head is throbbing, heartbeat bursts in his temples that threaten to explode his skull.
No! He won’t look.
His head lifts higher. Can’t. Can’t look.
But he does.
Jack’s eyes popped open and he was disoriented, trapped in a horror world, a nightmare place whose images hung in his mind, refused for a few moments to be washed away by reason. When they did finally dissolve into the wisps of smoke from a dying campfire, reality was little better.
Jack was lying on his back on the floor of the bourbon warehouse in front of the barrel elevator. Hunks of wood from the broken railing, his handcuffs—which had come loose from his belt—and one of the raised barrel guide rails were gouging holes in his back and his head was throbbing in heartbeat bursts, just as before. Each burst blurred his vision, but even blurred he could see Cole Stuart standing above him, one foot on either side of Jack’s chest, his grin displaying the bloody gap where his shattered front teeth had been.
CHAPTER 32
Decide who dies.
Emily.
Or Andi.
Not happening, couldn’t be happening.
Daniel’s breath died in his chest and he had not the strength to pull more air into his lungs.
“Listen pal, I’m gonna pick for you if you don’t hurry up. Who’s it gonna be?
“No, please, listen. I…you can’t…don’t, please don’t. It’s me you want. Take me. Please, take me instead of them.”
“You got ninety seconds. Ticking down now. I got me a real good watch. Took it off a smart-mouth orderly. He said he wanted me to have it since he didn’t need it anymore. It’s fine, got a sweep second hand. Coming up on a minute now.”
“Don’t…” But there were no words left.
Emily.
Or Andi.
Who lives?
Who dies?
He could not possibly make such a choice.
God, please…
No other words formed.
“Thirty seconds.”
* * * * * * *
“There’s no decision to be made,” Emily said.
She’d been silent through the whole nightmare conversation, trying to think of some way out.
The “handyman” had dragged her and Andi into the sanctuary. Unlike the brightly-lit Fellowship Hall, the worship center had no windows. They stood now in the center aisle, down from the altar, while a demon-possessed madman discussed with her husband whether she or her daughter would die.
She’d have to jump him, of course, knock the gun away somehow, though he had twelve inches and a hundred fifty pounds on her and nothing she did was likely to cause him any damage.
She held Andi against her, turned the little girl’s face away from the man and squeezed her so tight she must surely be strangling the child.
When Andi looked at the…man, what did she see?
Emily could hear Dan’s desperate voice over the speaker.
“Take me,” he said. “Let them go and take me.”
Those words stabbed a dagger of regret into her heart. What she’d done to him—he deserved so much better than that.
When the man said “thirty seconds,” she knew it was all over. She wasn’t afraid, just unutterably sad about all the weeks and months and years of Andi’s life she was going to miss.
All that mattered now, though, was getting this last part right.
“You will kill me and let my little girl go,” she said, and was pleasantly surprised that her voice sounded firm, didn’t tremble.
Then she felt rage and revulsion rise up into her chest and she let it take over. It gave her the power and strength she needed. “You will let my little girl go because I’m here to tell you—you vile beast!—that if you harm this child, if you touch her, you will have to kill me, too. You understand what I’m saying? I will rip your throat out with my fingernails. I will—”
“Ok, lady, I get it. I get it.” He was amused, not afraid. “A kid’s easier to control anyway. You get the short straw.”
And just like that, Emily knew she was about to die.
But that was an acceptable trade-off if she could save Andi as her final act on this earth. She pointed toward a small door that opened off the back of the dais where the pulpit sat. It was fiberglass—the pulpit—because Dan hadn’t wanted there to be anything between him and the congregation when he preached.
“I’m taking my daughter in there.” She didn’t ask, she informed. “It’s the closet where the choir robes are stored. I’m going to close her up in the
re so she doesn’t have to watch her mother…”
She let the words trail off. It seemed to take a long time to take in a breath and let it back out again so she could continue.
“You let me do that and I will…go willingly. Otherwise…” She literally bared her teeth at him. It just happened; she didn’t plan it. She bared her teeth and both hands cramped into perfectly manicured claws. “This is going to be ugly.”
The man actually barked out a cough of laughter.
“Whatever.” He sneered. “I don’t care where you stick her. But you try anything...”
“What’s left to try?”
Emily grabbed Andi’s hand and led her up the steps to the dais where the door opened off the back.
Tears streamed down the little girl’s cheeks but she was too frightened to cry out loud. She looked up pleadingly into her mother’s face.
“Mommy, no…please don’t.”
Dear God, she’s going to remember this moment for the rest of her life. If I can give her a life.
When Emily got to the door, she knelt and the little girl launched herself at her mother, grabbed her in a choke hold and burst into hysterical tears. Emily was spared having to think of “last words.” She knew exactly what she had to say.
She pulled the child’s arms away from her neck and took Andi’s face in her hands, kissed her forehead and whispered in her ear.
“When I close this door, you run. Up the ladder into the pageant storage room. Don’t close the trap door behind you, he might hear it. And you hide. You’re good at hide-and-seek. You can find some place to hide he’ll never find you. Do you understand me?”
Andi merely looked at her, mute, and nodded.
Emily couldn’t drag it out, had to do this quick before the idiot had the presence of mind to check for himself to make sure the room was a closet with only one door.
“I love you!” she cried fiercely. She opened the door, shoved Andi into the room and closed the door firmly behind her.