by Ted Dekker
He drilled the man with a hard stare, willing the layers of truth to be laid bare.
Englishman’s mouth flew wide, and his eyes filled with terror. He began to suck in air and shove it out like a pump that had lost its prime.
The stones suspended all around them hailed to the ground. He was dumbstruck. The confidence and strength he’d felt in the canyon above Paradise flooded his mind, quickened his breathing, and hammered through his chest. Sally had dropped to her knees and shielded her eyes with both hands.
Johnny bore down on Englishman again, baring layers of truth that he himself could not see.
“Take it,” he said.
Englishman began to shake violently from head to foot. His torso vibrated as if it had been crammed into a blender, and his head jerked from side to side, slowly at first, then gaining speed until it shook back and forth like a spring-loaded punching bag, fast enough to obscure his features, all except his black mouth, gaping obscenely wide.
Johnny took a step forward, gripped his fists tight, and leaned into whatever power flew from his eyes. His muscles were stretched tight, and he was still breathing hard.
“I believe,” he said. “I believe, Englishman. I am not the lie. You are the lie!”
A piercing wail came from the man’s throat. Not animal. Not human. More insect. Englishman was seeing the truth about himself, and he didn’t like what he saw.
Johnny began to scream. An open-mouthed, wordless scream of rage and remorse and terror and love and belief all wrapped around a single chord that he leveled at the lie with enough force to hurt his throat.
Englishman’s entire body became a screeching blur of agony. The thing’s terrible insectlike shrieks rose in pitch until they overpowered Johnny’s cry. The desert air was cut to ribbons with this earsplitting shriek of anguish.
The blur that was Englishman suddenly became an empty shirt and trousers that hung in the air.
Johnny’s scream caught in his throat.
Silence.
Then the whoosh of falling clothes, which plopped lightly on the ground between two shoes. A thin tendril of smoke rose from the shirt’s collar. Englishman occupied space with his unfathomable contortions one second, and became empty air with a twist of smoke the next.
Johnny took a step back, legs like spaghetti, heart hammering. He turned to face David Abraham’s fallen form, the dark stain of blood discoloring the desert sand, and if his world weren’t so twisted, so fractured, he might have thrown up. Instead, he swallowed hard and faced his mother, who wept through her fingers.
Somehow he managed to replace his glasses, but his legs were giving out. He sank to his knees, dumbstruck and spent. The world spun around him.
With a failing conscious effort, he released the cords that held his mother. Sensed more than saw her rushing toward him. Felt her arms crash around him. Heard her sobs of relief.
Someone was wailing, high-pitched. Samuel, tearing at them from the ranch house.
Then Johnny’s world went black.
44
Johnny and Kelly stood hand in hand, staring at the town of Paradise from the overlook high above. Sally stood beside them, arms crossed, sober.
Johnny had spent a week hidden away here with Kelly and Sally, discovering himself—his new self, his old self. His mother, his old friends, his place of birth, and his place of new birth.
He’d spent half that time in tears. Tears of sadness, tears of gladness, tears of relief and shame and love.
Samuel’s world had imploded with the death of his father. He’d fallen on his body and wept for an hour before allowing them to pull him away. They buried David Abraham four days ago, and the funeral had been a terrible mix of good and bad for Samuel.
Good because the president had given his father a burial of highest honor, which his father deserved.
Bad because in his speech, the president vowed to bring all involved in the assassination attempts and the death of his beloved friend to justice. This, Samuel learned in short order, included Johnny.
He’d attempted to kill the president of the United States of America.
Still faint from sorrow, Samuel had rushed back to Paradise and convinced Johnny to disappear. In good time, he would turn himself in. In good time.
Not now.
The threat from Kalman still loomed. The X Group had reportedly gone deep, but they would rear their heads again—these kind always did. Samuel wondered if Johnny wouldn’t quietly put an end to them in the next week or so. He certainly had the means to do it.
The press still had no idea about what had happened this last year. They probably never would know. What they did know for certain was straightforward:
The president was alive.
His would-be assassins were a man named Dale Crompton, better known as Englishman, now dead, and Johnny Drake, now missing.
Assim Feroz, who had masterminded the president’s assassination attempt, was now also dead, killed by his own hired guns.
Robert Stenton vetoed the Iranian initiative, and no other world leader had yet come forward to resurrect it.
Samuel approached them and studied the peaceful town. “Have you decided?”
“We are going to the desert,” Johnny said. “To Nevada.”
“Nevada. Plenty of desert.”
“Plenty of desert,” Johnny said. “Have you heard any news about the president’s son?”
“His condition continues to deteriorate.”
Johnny frowned but offered no comment. He maintained that it was Jamie who’d first broken through his shell and got him thinking about a father figure, which David ended up being.
“Any change in your eyes?” Sally asked, placing her hand on his shoulder.
Johnny turned his head south so that he faced neither of them, then lifted his glasses for a moment before lowering them back into place.
“No.”
“I don’t think it will ever change,” Samuel said.
Johnny remained silent. The burden he bore with this new gift was hardly imaginable.
He wore the mirrored glasses for their sakes as much as his own. He could see well enough, but not the way the rest of them did. No color. Only black and white. With definition and acute depth perception formed by a thin crackle of white light that outlined everything, he said.
Samuel had looked into the whites of his eyes only once and then very briefly. The horror that had blazed a trail through his mind in that moment was a thing he’d never forget. He wasn’t sure how it would affect Johnny and Kelly’s relationship. She’d seen enough on the helicopter, when his eyes were just starting to go milky, to swear off ever looking into his eyes again.
“And the other abilities?” Samuel asked.
“Nothing.”
He nodded. Johnny’s blindness had remained. His other powers had left him. In some ways he was like Samson, who had lost his powers and gone blind. But Johnny’s greatest gift was his revealing sight. Imagine what he could do in a session of Congress with those eyes.
“I think it could return,” Samuel said, speaking of his other power.
“I’m not sure I want it to.”
“Then it won’t.”
Kelly reached up and kissed Johnny lightly on his cheek. “I love you the way you are.”
He placed his arm around her and kissed her forehead. “And I love you the way you are.”
They returned their gazes to the valley. “Are you ready?” Johnny asked.
“I am,” Kelly replied.
Johnny had become a man of faith, but he was still unsure about his role. For now he was a brooding hero trying to stay alive long enough to come to terms with who he was.
“So this is it,” Sally mused. “There really is no alternative?”
“The authorities will be in Paradise by nightfall. This is it. I either turn myself in or buy some time. Would you rather I stay?”
“No,” Sally said. “Run. But promise me you’ll come back.”
“I pr
omise.”
Samuel wasn’t sure what to think about the other two who’d written in the same book that had given Johnny such power. Or if there were still other characters like Englishman lurking, created by the monk Marsuvees Black before his demise.
Samuel extended a hand to Johnny. “Take care, my friend. Try not to get lost in that desert.”
“I think I’ve been lost enough for one lifetime.” He clasped Samuel’s fingers and smiled.
Samuel stepped forward and hugged Johnny, who returned the hug with strong arms. “Be careful.”
“I’ll see you again, Samuel. I just need some time.”
“You know I’ll have to tell them that you went into the desert.”
“I know. Keep your nose clean. I have a feeling I’ll be needing your help again.”
Samuel pulled back, kissed Kelly’s hand, and let them go. Johnny kissed Sally. Tears brimmed in her eyes.
“I love you, Mother.”
“I love you, Johnny.”
Kelly and Johnny walked away, hand in hand.
“Saint.”
Johnny turned back. “Saint?”
“Remember what I said about your power,” Samuel said. “The giver of the gift doesn’t take it back so easily.”
Johnny stared at him as if unsure of what he meant. Then he smiled, turned back down the mountain, and stepped onto the path. “Remember that, Saint.”
“I will,” Johnny said without turning. “I will.”
AN EXCERPT FROM
CHAPTER ONE_______________________________________________
When the rain isn’t so much falling—be it in bucket loads or like cats and dogs—but rather slamming into the car like an avalanche of stone, you know it’s time to pull over.
When you can’t see much more than the slaphappy wipers splashing through rivers on the windshield, when you’re suddenly not sure if you’re on the road any longer, and your radio emits nothing but static, and you haven’t seen another car since the sky turned black, and your fingers are white on the wheel in an attempt to steady the old Accord in the face of terrifying wind gusts, you know that it’s so totally time to pull over.
Wendy leaned over the steering wheel, searching for the yellow lines that separated the two-lane highway. No real shoulder that she could see. What was to keep another car from rear-ending her if she pulled over here?
She’d seen the black clouds pillaring on the horizon as she headed across the Nevada desert. Heard the tornado warnings on the radio before it had inexplicably fried. The fact that this wasn’t tornado territory had the announcers in a bit of a frenzy.
Wendy had ignored the warnings and pressed on into evening. She’d given herself two days for the long haul between San Diego and western Utah. The call from her mother asking her to come had frozen Wendy for a good ten seconds, phone in hand. Had to be Thursday, this week, her mother had insisted. It was now Tuesday night. Wendy wondered if she’d see the rest of the Brotherhood cult, or just her mother. The thought of either was enough to keep her awake at night.
The tribe, as the leader Bronson called it, was a somewhat nomadic group of twenty or so members, going where God led them. God had evidently led them to remote Utah-Nevada now.
Wendy had been born into the cult and had managed to escape seven years earlier, on her seventeenth birthday, the day she was to wed Torrey Bronson as his third wife. Twice she’d hired private investigators to locate the tribe and report on her mother’s condition. Twice the report had come back favorable. But the investigators had never actually talked to her mother—speaking to anyone from the outside world was strictly forbidden. Even making eye contact was good for a day in isolation. Physical contact, heaven forbid, was grounds for severe punishment.
Inside the cult there was plenty of touching and hugging and kissing, but no physical contact with strangers ever, period. That was the Brotherhood way.
Wendy had fallen in an Oklahoma ditch when she was seven years old and broken her leg. A farmer had heard her cries and taken her to the others who were searching. Before setting her leg, Father Bronson had beaten her severely for allowing unclean hands to touch her. The lashing hurt more than the broken leg. It was the last time Wendy had touched or been touched by anyone outside the tribe before escaping.
And when Father Bronson had taken it upon himself to break her two thumbs and her two forefingers as punishment for kissing Tony, another thirteen- year-old in the tribe at the time, he’d made it excruciatingly clear that he’d claimed her for himself alone.
She’d fled the cult, but not the wounding of such a perverse childhood. Few knew the extent of the damage; she hid it well behind soft eyes and a light smile. But to this day even the thought of physical contact with men unnerved her.
No issue in Wendy’s tumultuous life consumed her as much as this failing. Touch was her personal demon. A beast that prevented her from expressing the deep caring she’d felt in any relationship with men, isolating her from love, romantic or otherwise.
Now, driving through nature’s fury, she felt oddly isolated again. It was suddenly clear that her decision to continue into the dark clouds had been a mistake.
As if hearing and understanding that it had played unfairly with her, the storm suddenly eased. She could see the road again.
See, now that wasn’t so bad . . . Time to retreat to the nearest overcrowded motel to wait out the storm with the rest of the traveling public.
She could even see the signs now, and the green one she passed said that the turnoff to Summerville was in five miles. Exit 354. A hundred yards farther, a blue sign indicated that there were no services at this exit.
Scrub oak lined the highway. Freak storm. Flash floods. Truth be told, it was all a bit exciting. As long as the storm didn’t delay her, she kind of liked the idea of—
Her headlights hit a vehicle in the road ahead. Like a wraith, the cockeyed beast glared at her through the rainy night, unmoving, dead on the road. A pickup truck.
She slammed her foot on the brake.
The Accord’s rear wheels lost traction on the wet pavement and slid around to her left. She gripped the steering wheel, knuckles white. Her headlights flashed past scrub oak that lined the road.
For an instant Wendy thought the car might roll. But the wet asphalt kept the Accord’s wheels from catching and throwing her over.
Unfortunately, the slick surface also prevented the tires from stopping her car before it crashed into the pickup.
Wendy jerked forward, allowing her forearms to absorb most of the impact.
Steam hissed from under her hood. Rain splattered. But Wendy was unhurt, apart from maybe a bruise or two. She sat still, collecting herself.
Oddly enough, the airbags hadn’t deployed. Maybe it was the angle. She’d hit the other vehicle’s front bumper in a full slide, so that her left front fender had taken the brunt of the impact before becoming wedged under the grill.
She picked up her cell phone and snapped it open. No Service.
No service for more than half an hour now.
She tried the door. It squealed some, then opened easily before striking the smallish pickup, which she now saw was green. She climbed out, hardly noticing the rain. The pickup was missing its right front wheel and sat on the inner guts of the brake contraption—which explained the tire she now saw in the road. Her eyes returned to the pickup’s door. The side window was shattered. The front windshield seemed intact, except for two round holes punched through on the driver’s side.
Bullet holes.
Of course she couldn’t be sure they were bullet holes, but it was the first thought to cross her mind, and having done so, she could hardly consider that mere debris had punched those two perfect circles through the glass.
Someone had shot at the driver.
Wendy jerked her head around for sign of another car or a shooter. Nothing she could see, but that didn’t mean they weren’t out there. For a moment she stood glued to the pavement, mind divided between the
drenching she was receiving from the rain, and those two bullet holes.
She remembered the pistol in the console compartment between her Accord’s front seats. Louise had talked her into buying it long ago, when they’d first met at the shelter. Wendy had never received the training she’d intended to, nor fired the gun. But there it lay, and if there was ever a time for it . . .
She flung the Accord’s door wide and ducked inside. Finding and dislodging the black pistol case from between the seats proved a slippery, knuckle-burning task with wet fingers. Yet she managed to wrench it out. She disengaged the sliding mechanism that opened the case, snatched out the cold steel weapon, and fumbled it, trying to remember what the safety looked like.
Meanwhile her butt, which was still sticking out in the rain, was taking a bath. The gun slipped from her hands, thudded on the floor mat. She swore and reached for it, found the trigger, and would have blown a hole in the car if the safety had been off.
Thank God for safeties.
Now she found the safety and disengaged it. However unfamiliar she was with guns, Wendy was no idiot. Neither was she anything similar to gutless.
Whoever was in the truck might still be alive, God forbid even injured, and out here in this storm. And Wendy was the only one who could help. Sniper lurking or not, she would never abandon anyone in need.
Wendy turned the key in the Accord’s ignition. The car purred to life. It was still steaming through the hood, but at least it ran.
She turned it off, took a calming breath, then slipped back out of the car and hurried around to the truck’s passenger door, staying low.
With a last look around the deserted highway, keeping the gun in both hands down low the way she’d often seen such weapons wielded on the big screen, she poked her head up and looked through the passenger window.
Empty.
She stood up for a better look. The driver’s window was smeared with something. Blood. But no body. Someone had been shot. The truck had apparently sideswiped another car and lost its front wheel before coming to a rest.
Wendy scanned the shoulder and ditches for any sign of a fallen body. Nothing.