“Nice to meet you,” Kevan said.
“Another one scorned by the gods. So, why do I have to meet him now?” Ezekiel said.
“Because I want to know when you’re going to use me. When is the next mission?”
“What? Sara said you were done.”
“What? Fucking Sara. No, she might be done but I’m not. And neither is my brother.”
August looked at Kevan. Kevan gave him a quizzical look. He hadn’t told him that they were going to meet the rebel leader. But he played it cool.
“Good, we need everybody we got. A few key members have recently disappeared. Probably into the pits of damnation itself.”
“Are you going to tell us what your grand mission is?”
Ezekiel laughed. “I still don’t trust you enough to tell you that.”
“But you were trusting enough to meet me out in public. I’m surprised you haven’t been strung up by the hamstrings out of the tower of Ifor yet.”
“We all will meet the Maker to account for our sins soon enough, August. But you do trust me, right?”
“Yes,” August said.
“But you wouldn’t trust me to hold your nuts while you were shaving your taint with the sharpest razor blade you had would you?”
“Uh, no.”
“Then you can understand where I’m coming from. But there are ways to build on that trust.”
“Do tell.”
“Tomorrow morning, I’ll need men for a mission. A part of my big plan to put a hurtin’ on Ifor, it’s almost certainly a suicide mission … in fact, all the mission from now on are suicidal but I need people. And if you show up and do your part, you’ll win my trust.”
Kevan turned to August and said, “Suicidal?”
August said to Ezekiel, “My brother has a family and kids, so I’m sure he’s not down to do anything stupid. But he could help support the cause.”
“I’m fine with that. August alone is good enough. Now give me your number.”
“I thought you knew everything about me?”
“Not when you use burner phones,” Ezekiel said with a smile. “Now, give me.”
August told him his number and he wrote it down.
“Now, sometime in the next few days, you’ll get a text with a location. You will go to this location and you will give up your phone at the door. We do that for security reasons. And then you’ll be briefed on the mission. Be prepared to die for humanity, August. Because, officially, you’ll be in.”
After getting the details, August and Kevan left. Ezekiel continued to stand in the alleyway. A tear ripped through reality itself and the Omniscient Man stepped out of a hole filled with stars.
He stood next to Ezekiel. Ezekiel looked at him. “Will they come? Can I trust them?”
“Yes, you can trust them and at least one of them will come to you.”
“So… one of them will take my place when I die.”
The Omniscient Man looked at him. “Yes. My other doesn’t know that. So, don’t speak of this to him.”
“Okay. I’ll go out with a bang then.” Ezekiel smiled.
Sara sat on the bed. She stared at her shrine of He. She could hear Luna cooking in the kitchen. She wanted to save August from himself. Without him, her world would fall apart. She needed to save him.
She closed her eyes. What would He do?
August and Kevan stood in the elevator of their apartment building. August checked his phone; they’d been gone for four hours. He hadn’t expected Ezekiel to ask to meet so far away. He would have to apologize to Luna for missing her meal.
Kevan said, “That Ezekiel guy seems…”
“Crazy?”
“A little bit. To think a sophisticated network of spies, killers, and rebels are run under him.”
“Maybe it was the craziness that helped him start the rebellion in the first place.”
“True.”
The elevator door dinged and opened.
Their door was open down the hall.
Kevan said, “Who left the door open?”
August pulled his handgun out and Kevan did the same. They slowly approached their apartment. As they got closer, August noticed the door was broken off its hinges.
“Forced entry,” August said.
“Luna!” Kevan ran into the apartment.
“Wait!” August ran after him.
Inside, the dining room table was overturned, eggs and bacon were splattered on the floor and wall. There’d been a fight. But thankfully, there was no blood.
Kevan ran to the bedroom and looked back to August. “They’re gone!”
A scream pierced Brookes’ ear as he slowly slid a knife into Luna’s left foot. She was tied to a chair in a small dark room.
“Shush, you’re going to wake up your kiddies. The little girl who gave you up doesn’t know I’m doing this so…” he said. He shoved a gag into her mouth. She shook, trying to escape, but it was no use.
Outside of the room was a large living area. There were multiple tables in the area with equipment on them. Radios, guns, bullets, and maps. Ten men in black tactical gear lazed around. One of them on baby duty, watching the babies sleep in a makeshift crib.
The room led to a long hallway, and down that hallway was a small room. Inside the room, Sara leaned against the wall. Her phone was in her hand.
She needed to call him. She dialed a number.
August picked up, “Hello? Sara!?”
“August?”
“Sara! Where are you?”
“I helped them, they’re safe.”
“What? You helped what, Sara?”
“I contacted Ifor, I saved us, August. We can stop running away. We can start living again.”
August didn’t reply back. She had lost it.
“No more hiding, no more running away. We can live under He again. He’ll always watch over us.”
“Where are you?” August’s voice lowered.
August stared at his phone as Sara hung up. Kevan stood next to him. “How? How could she?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“She fucked us, she’s killed my wife and my kids!”
“She told me where they were.”
“We have to get my family back, August.”
“But… they’ll be waiting for us.”
“I don’t care. I’m going with or without you.”
Kevan checked his pistol. It was the only weapon he had. They had bullets and explosives in the car but that was it.
August stood up. “Okay. Let’s go.”
August drove up the Pacific Coast highway, heading north. The location she told them was half-way between Sotira in Northern California and Los Angeles.
Kevan sat next to him, rubbing the butt of the gun with his thumb. “I knew her for years. How could she do that? How could she knowingly put my wife and kids in danger?”
“I did the same, remember?” August said.
“That was different, you were ignorant of the fact because of how far your head was up your ass.”
“Thanks.”
“She never seemed like a person who would do that. She was the good one.”
“Things changed after her accident.”
“How?”
“I…I don’t know. She suddenly became enlightened, like our father was. She was praising the gods, saying they would save us. But, it never seemed like she would go this far.”
“Can you not compare our father to that woman? Our father never killed anyone, never did anything that bad. He was a hero.”
“You really don’t remember, do you? Why I hated our father so much?”
“Because you couldn’t come to terms with your own insignificance?”
“Stop. You must’ve been too young to remember how our father truly was.”
August remembered back to when he was younger, back when Kevan had just saying his first words. Taking his first steps.
Their father was an Ifor soldier; he would leave for months while their mother was left to
raise them on her own.
August still remembered those years. His mother was working two jobs, waking up early in the morning to get August ready for elementary school, while having to take Kevan to day-care for the day.
Then when August came home from school, she would cook and clean and get them ready for the next day and put them to bed so she could go work her second job.
She did that for two years while Patrick was away. Their father didn’t give them a single damn cent to help raise them. Then, when he finally had come home, nothing changed for the better.
He forced their mother to quit her jobs and made her stay at home. He would leave for most parts of the day and come home drunk and start beating on her. And when she couldn’t take a beating anymore, he would beat on August and Kevan.
Every day, August would stay at school after his classes for the day, finding any excuse to not go home. But eventually he had to, and eventually he had to take another beating just for existing. He recalled what his father would yell when laying his foot into him. “The gods aren’t going to save you, boy. You’re a worthless piece of shit.”
Barbara once had some fight in her. But after a while, that was beaten away and she became a shell of her former self. She didn’t eat as much, she broke a lot easier than before. He used to hear her cry every night, praying to whoever would listen to help her, to save her.
Nobody ever came to their rescue. She waited for a god that never cared for them.
Then one day, everything changed. August was playing around Patrick’s pride and joy. His low rider motorcycle. A vintage Harley. His dad loved that thing more than he did the any of them.
When Patrick saw August playing near it, he beat him so hard that he broke a few ribs. He left August to die on the ground while he decided to ride off somewhere. When August saw him leave, he cursed him, hoping that someone would hurt him enough to leave them alone forever. Enough to never hurt them again.
He would’ve died if his mother hadn’t come to see where his father had gone.
August got his wish, that very day. His father was hit by an eighteen-wheeler. Knocked clean off of the motorcycle, but he survived.
That was the day he changed.
After the accident, he started to pray to some nonexistent god who watched over them. They started to go to church to praise He and Patrick got a desk job at the local Ifor office. He became an Enlightened.
Becoming an Enlightened changed a person. In such a way they could never change back. There was still a person in there but it was pushed back in the face of the illusion of what a person wanted to be; it was a lie.
Some thought Patrick changed for the better, but August knew it was a lie. He'd never apologized for what he’d done to them. He never regretted a single damned thing.
Kevan stared at August. “I … I don’t remember that.”
“That’s because you were young. You still had the power to forget. I didn’t.”
“So, what are you going to do when you meet Sara? If she’s as enlightened as our father was?”
“When dad spoke his final breath…he thanked me.”
Kevan stared at August. A tear entered his eye.
“I freed him from the lie he was living, from the constraints of the gods.”
“August. What are you going to do when you see Sara again?” Kevan asked again.
August stared at the road. He didn’t answer him. His hands gripped the wheel. He was going to have to kill her.
7
Saint Paul’s Massacre
Twenty years before August had killed his father, there was a certain day that had lived in infamy. The day of the Saint Paul massacre. The day that the gods had first shown aggression against an at the time tranquil human race. The day that Ezekiel had decided to fight against Ifor, and the day that had changed Brookes, Patrick, and humanity forever.
* * *
Brookes stared at his hands on the desk. They shook slightly. He had none of his trademark clothes or hair, his beard was fully shaved with his hair cut and neat. He was a twenty-something-year old soldier of Ifor. A member of the God’s Hand.
He shook because of his new assignment. They told him that he’d finally be able to see some action.
That excited him. Action. Most soldiers were appointed to dullest peace-keeping missions. Patrolling towns. Building bridges. Fetching cats out of trees. Boring shit. Nothing exciting ever happened. Which was the reason he left his shitty boring home-town in the first place.
He wanted to live life. He wanted action. But so far, he hadn’t had any.
He sat in a briefing room with ninety-nine other soldiers. A general was up front giving them their orders. General Oziel. Patrick Hedley sat next to Brookes. He stared up at the board in the front.
It showed a map of Saint Paul. A small European town.
The general spoke, “This mission is top secret. If any word leaks out of this room or you break the silence you swore to Ifor, you had better desert because there will only be death left for you here.”
He turned to the board and a projector projected an overhead map of Saint Paul on the wall. “This is our target. The people in this town are part of a cult that worships a foreign God. The town refused to pay tariffs to Ifor and have purchased enough weapons to wipe out the next town over. They have declared a holy war against He himself and believe that Ifor would just sit around and allow them to insult our lord and creator. But the judgement of the gods is fast and swift and we will strike while they’re still praying to their nonexistent God.”
Brookes stared at the board. It didn’t seem right. But he didn’t say anything. He was just a soldier then.
“They have declared a total war. You will go in there and wipe out every living soul you see. Every mother, father, and child. There will be no hesitation. They will have the faith of Ifor forced onto them and if you have any objections, I will put the bullet in your head myself.”
Nobody objected. Brookes stared at the general. He was a gruff old man. Brookes thought the man was putting on an act. He wondered how he got that kind of personality. There hadn’t been any human wars in centuries. No major conflicts. But maybe he was putting on an act for himself. As he had just ordered the death of an entire town.
Brookes wasn’t sure how he’d feel about the mission. But he couldn’t speak his mind now; he had signed up for a reason and there was no backing out.
Brookes looked at Patrick. He had a puzzled look on his face. He mouthed the words, “What the fuck?” He wasn’t the only soldier with that look on his face.
The general paused when he noticed the looks he was getting. “You signed up for this job, boys, and this is what we do. We follow the orders of the gods and the gods want this city gone. You—”
The general halted. He stared at the door. “Men! Ten Hut!”
The soldiers snapped out of their seats and into attention. The General was at attention, as well.
“At ease, gentlemen,” a woman’s voice said at the door. Queen strolled to the front as everyone eased. Brookes stared at her. She was a pure beauty. The others stared too.
She was a god. The highest one he knew, under He. Her skin seemed to glow as she walked up to the general. “I was listening in and I didn’t hear you tell them why I am here.”
“Oh, yes. Queen is here to turn y’all into Touched. If you’ve been slow on your training, a Touched is a human being touched by the graces of the gods. You will not be hurt by human weapons, you will be able to do the craziest shit…” The general glanced at Queen. She looked indifferent. The general coughed.
“As I was saying, you will gain the strength of three men, your skin will be impenetrable by human-made weapons and, essentially you will become near immortal. If this mission is a success - and it will be a success - and if you showed exemplary skill and workmanship then you will keep the power of the Touched and be transferred over to a god’s personal army.”
Some gasped. To become Touched and to work in a god�
��s army was the greatest achievement a soldier could strive for. It was the highest point a human soldier could achieve, to have the power of the gods.
“No more working the streets, no more minuscule shi—minuscule work. You will be promoted to the ranks of an officer and work on missions that matter. Which god you’ll be assigned to will be determined after the operation.”
Queen sighed. The general stiffened. “…And I now give the floor to you, Queen. Sorry for the delay, ma’am.”
Queen walked to the first desk in front of her. She simply touched a soldier and walked to the next one. And then to the next one and then to the next.
Brookes watched her as she went down the rows. Nobody lit up or shone. Nobody did a thing. Was “Touched” just a bullshit term so they could feel invincible?
She approached Brookes and tapped him. She stopped and looked at his face. He kept his head forward. He didn’t want to look her in the eyes. The eyes of a god.
She whispered, “You’re mine.” And walked to the next soldier. What? He glanced back and she kept going without a second look.
After a few minutes, everyone had been “Touched.” She walked back to the general and held out her hand. “Gun.”
“What?” The general asked.
“Gun. Don’t make me repeat myself.”
The general undid his holster and pulled out his military-issued Beretta M9 pistol. Queen grabbed it and pointed it at Brookes.
“What?” he muttered.
She fired and Brookes closed his eyes. He felt a ting on his forehead. “Ow!” He opened his eyes and he was fine. Everyone was staring at him with wide open eyes. He rubbed the spot where the bullet hit him.
Another soldier picked up the bullet and studied it. The bullet had bounced right off him.
“You all are now Touched,” Queen said. “That doesn’t mean you’re invincible, you’re not immortal, you are not a god. You are a human. You can be injured from the products of the earth, explosions and many other things. So, if you squander this gift I gave you, passing to the Radiant will be the least of your concerns, as you will be wishing for nonexistence.” She gave the general his gun back and walked toward the door. “May you be in our favor.”
Legends of the Damned: A Collection of Edgy Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels Page 209