Expired

by Evie Rhodes

  Me was angry now.

  “I swallowed the gifts. Just like I will swallow your egg. Just like I will leave you dead in this house. This is your final resting place, Tracie Burlingame.” Me’s tone had turned into a growl of blackness.

  Tracie turned to Anita. She was tiring of the game. No, actually she was becoming bored with this beast and the games being played. “Enlighten us, Anita. Enlighten the bald mountain here, who obviously hasn’t been told all by his leader.”

  Anita came over to stand next to Tracie. The old woman stood beside her, with her shoulder touching Tracie’s. A great pride rose up inside her. She, too, had been deceived, had been made to use her gift falsely. Now she had an opportunity to atone for that.

  “Me, today you ain’t gone leave her with nothing.”

  Me gave her a look that normally would have shriveled her. But the image of Christ Jesus and his grace kept her standing.

  The thought of possible deceit kept Me listening.

  “Tracie Burlingame here and I have been dreaming the same dream. In that dream there are many li’l black babies sailing through the atmosphere. Droppin’ like sweet tomatoes from a branch, from between a woman’s legs,” Anita spoke softly and with total conviction.

  Tracie looked over at Anita. She gave her a warm smile. Never in Tracie’s life had she felt as she did at that moment, when she was being bathed in the light of Christ and his awesome magnificence.

  She shivered at the raw power of his being.

  She had known that this woman had the answers, and so she had spoken to her, to reveal them. By her faith and belief, and by the power of the spirit of the Holy Ghost, Tracie knew that it would be.

  “There’s a force, Me, that’s been sweeping some of them there babies away. I think you know who that is. But there’s also a force that’s been wrappin’ them little old black babies in pure white swaddling. Hmmph, now, I’m sure that wouldn’a been you.”

  Anita made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and great distress.

  “Yes, Me. You’ve been so busy just swallowing up the gifts. You could never had done that if our people hadn’t misunderstood, thinkin’ that all they had, all their talents, was of they own doing and came from them, while they was wrecking destruction among our own people.

  “If they had any inkling of how to tap into their true power, you wouldn’a been able to touch them. Just like you can’t touch Tracie Burlingame and me right now. Can you, Me?”

  “Me can do all things.”

  Anita couldn’t help it. She laughed. “You can do only those things that you are given the power to do. I’m an old woman, Me. I told you before, don’t play with me. I done figured it out, Me.

  “Throughout the centuries some of our people have been trying to tell on you. In bits and pieces they’ve been sorta revealing you over time. You were afraid that one day somebody’d come along and piece together all the broken pieces.

  “That’s why you stole the words from the books in Ms. Virginia’s bookshop and in the Schomberg Center. Explains why you desecrated the authors’ pictures in Schomberg, too. They each tried to warn the people, here and there.

  “I guess what you ain’t counted on was one thing: all things come to an end, sooner or later. There’s a beginning and there’s an end. The woman in the dream from whose legs those li’l black babies is falling is standing in front of you, Me.”

  In Me’s eyes devastation flickered.

  He hadn’t been aware of that. She was just the host from whom he needed the egg—the one he needed to destroy. But the implications of the old woman’s words began to loom large in his mind.

  He felt the very earth shake under his feet. He knew that soon there would be a shift in things.

  Anita ignored his reflections and continued. “Those li’l black babies that are being caught in the pure white swaddling represent a new generation, Me. A generation that will be born with understanding. A generation who will honor the Lord God Almighty and his Son, Christ Jesus!

  “Which means that your trickery and treachery will no longer destroy our people so easily as you and those of your pattern have done in the past. John the Baptist spoke once and said God is able to raise up these grains of sand to worship him.

  “I know you is familiar with them there words, Me, cuz that’s the only book you could never swallow the words in. You ain’t swallowed those words, cuz you can’t hold that which is holy. Cuz you are the unholy. Spawn from the enemy of God. Spawn from darkness.”

  Roz’s words sounded off in Rashod’s head. “Why I been gathering the souls for my brother Jesus. He can’t hide them from Jesus.” Rashod suddenly knew. His eyes opened as the scales fell from his sight.

  He looked at Tracie. He projected the vision of Dre and Michael kneeling in prayer in the church, before the altar with the Bible on it. Both flames of fire were flickering beside it.

  Rashod had given them understanding. He had taught them how to fight—not with the weapons of street warfare, but in the spirit. As the two live boys who remained to Tracie Burlingame, it had been imperative that they become of one accord while this battle took place.

  It had been imperative because there could be no link through which Satan could move or which he could use to disconnect Tracie Burlingame.

  Jesus had promised he would not forsake his people. If they believed, he would be there.

  Through his faith and belief, Rashod had been able to assist in bringing his brothers through that fold. Michael had already been somewhat prepared, and so had Dre, through his dealings with Souljah Boy.

  They had decided to become true warriors and to learn what being tough and not being a punk was really all about. The preacher had been on standby. He had baptized them immediately after they accepted the Lord Jesus Christ. They had risen up from the holy water, in one accord with the spirit. It had been a sight to see.

  That was shortly after the Reverend King had found the old preacher dead, lying in the sackcloth and ashes after his three days of repentance for Tracie Burlingame and her seed.

  The spirit had spoken unto him, “Baptize the boys, and leave the body be.”

  So he had left the old minister where he was and had gone to do as he had been instructed. Now he knelt beside them in a vigil of prayer, as the war that had been thus declared before any of their times raged on.

  He hadn’t gone back to the old preacher’s room since the spirit had thus spoken to him. So he had no way of knowing that the body of the old man was no longer there. Neither were the sackcloth and ashes, nor the ancient trunk.

  54

  Legion did not like the script that was being played out in front of him. Me was a damned imbecile. That was why he had only used him in a limited capacity. He would destroy this fool. A mere woman was taking him down.

  Didn’t this fool know that he had used a woman to cause the original destruction that had set the tides a-turning?

  Before Me stood a hood rat. Nothing else. Some little black girl, all grown up from the hood, who thought that because she fell on her knees in an unknown spot, that gave her power.

  He would show her what real power was.

  Legion shook the very ground that Harlem was sitting on. Anita’s apartment tilted. It rocked from side to side, like a sheet blowing in the wind. The three of them were toppled from their feet.

  They fell on the floor as everything in the room became unhinged and fell in ruins all around them. Anita’s rabbits became one ball of fur that tunneled through the room and straight out the broken windows.

  Anita screamed out, “Pesky!”

  But Pesky was blown away in the wind. The walls began to tear away from their joints. The room descended in pitch-black darkness.

  A voice funneled through their sphere.

  “Tracie Burlingame! I am Legion!” The voice had an eerie commanding quality to it. The gravelly, authoritative tone made the hairs on Tracie’s neck stand up.

  “You have something that belongs to me.
I want it now.” A force that felt like many hands grabbed at Tracie. They were all over her. She felt them trying to crawl underneath her skin.

  Trying to get inside her.

  While the hands continued to try to invade her being, Tracie looked up to see a creature swathed from head to toe in black. What she saw was not human. He had more eyes than she could count. He had a multitude of noses. His mouth was lizardlike. A long, slimy-looking tongue protruded and swiped itself across her face.

  Tracie almost fainted from the shock of it. Suddenly the hands stopped pulling at her, because they had another mission. They had been instructed to bury her alive. She was dropped into a black coffin, covered in black silk. As she screamed, the cover on the coffin slammed shut. It was dropped into the bowels of the earth. Mounds of heavy earthly dirt descended on top of the coffin.

  Tracie beat her hands against the coffin as the air was sucked out of it, until they were red and bleeding. All the sound had been sucked out. So there was nothing but the hollowness of her screams. Her screams were completely muffled.

  The dull thudding of her knocking against the top of the coffin was in vain. And she was running out of oxygen fast.

  “Keep your egg, Tracie. It will never be fertilized anyway. I didn’t need to steal it. All I needed to do was bury it, along with you.”

  Laughter resounded through the air.

  The coffin flipped bottom side up. The mounds of dirt continued to rain down on it, pushing it farther and farther, deeper into the earth. Tracie’s coffin was some four hundred feet below sea level.

  The preacher and Tracie’s sons kept praying.

  Anita had screamed out at the sight of Tracie being dropped into the coffin, “Jesus! Oh, Jesus! God! Help us!” And then she had proceeded to bellow and cry from the depths of her belly; the sweat rolled down the old woman’s face in rivulets as she called on the only word that she could get out of her mouth, “Jesus!”

  Satan was clever. He hadn’t come the way they had thought he might. He had simply decided to snuff out the host mother and what she carried in her womb. It would be buried forever. It would be buried in the dungeons of his creations, along with the carcass that was Tracie Burlingame.

  Why should he exert himself playing grandstand games? He had it like that. It was over. Tracie Burlingame was over. It was the end.

  As he listened, he heard Tracie take her last earthly breath. It was done. For good measure he plunged the coffin another six hundred feet beneath the earth, never to be seen or heard from again.

  He put his hooves together, and he applauded a job well done. Me smiled at him. He fell down on his knees in worship, secretly hoping that Legion wouldn’t destroy him. That he would be so happy with his victory and with the job he had done, he would spare Me his wrath.

  And actually Legion was feeling quite pleased with himself. Even though Me had been stupid, there was no reason to act hastily. He could always continue to use him for the small things, the light work that he himself had no time for. Anyway, Me was an official extension of him, which meant that he would be killing off a part of himself if he got rid of Me.

  There was no need to dilute his power in this way. So instead he looked at Me and told him, “Stay on your knees until I tell you to get up.”

  Me was grateful for the reprieve, so he just nodded his head, not even wanting the sound of his voice to trigger anything.

  There was one partying host of demons as they realized what Satan had accomplished. They could continue their reign of destruction among this people. They could continue to deceive them and lead them astray from the truth. Now they would never have to worry about a generation that might fight back as a whole, one that might know better. No.

  The two fools Tracie had left behind were no threat—Satan and his demons knew that. Legion was a longtime student of the spirit. The sons would falter without their anchor that was Tracie Burlingame. It had not been given to either of them anyway.

  Tracie Burlingame’s living sons were nothing more than mere shells of her womb. Tracie was thirty-eight years old when Legion buried her alive. In her future had been a new marriage, but more than that, in her future there had been a new birth. It had been written that on her fiftieth birthday she would have given birth to her last male child.

  That child would carry the seed from which the future generations would have been raised up to know the Lord Jesus Christ. They would have learned to respect their gifts and talents. They would have learned to worship the eternal living God and his Son, Jesus Christ, with honor and respect.

  There would have been a new vineyard that was planted. A vineyard that was in direct connection with the true vine and with his Father, the husbandman. The real Holy Father who had originally given his all, by sacrificing his only living Son for the sins of the world.

  Yes, he had given all that could be given.

  In exchange, all he had ever really wanted was to be in one accord with his people, that they should seek his face and turn from their wicked ways.

  Also, Tracie Burlingame had been the intended future scribe, the one who would pen her memoirs through her journey in the spirit, leaving a legacy of hope for her people.

  The one who would string together the bits and pieces that the authors, over a term of many centuries, had been laying the groundwork for.

  Legion had thrown another stumbling block in front of them. He rejoiced as his liquid blackness shook like a bowl of Jell-O. One more was down in the course of things. He had buried the host mother alive. He threw open his dungeons to the festivities. Then he retired to his private quarters to enjoy another victory.

  Tracie Burlingame . . . the spiritual patchwork quilt. The voices had been silenced and could no longer reach her. At one time they had been raucous. Those were the spirits that Me had swallowed, being reflected back in her being, seeking her help.

  The black patches had represented her sons—her dead sons, as death was coming upon them—as well as Raymond, who had already been killed. And the other sequestered spirits that had died including the fifty black boys murdered in Harlem.

  The hollowed-out patches she had lived in her journey through the spirit.

  The lizardlike tongue had swallowed what it wanted whole. Now it salivated in its victory. It was the representative of Satan, devouring the African-American people through their sins.

  It had also swallowed the whole of Tracie’s quilt in the ritual of the burial. Her quilt was no longer alive. She was no longer a patchwork quilt with the prophecies alive in her being. She wasn’t anything at all.

  Legion laughed.

  She was just no more. Victory. The taste of it was sweet on his lips.

  He closed his eyes so he could relive the sweetness of it from the beginning.

  Besides, it had all been recorded.

  55

  While Tracie Burlingame had been expiring, the police and all their experts were left with no real answers to the multitudes of bodies that occupied the morgue. The people had to be given some answers.

  A private meeting had convened. It would mark the first time all the leaders had pulled together and decided on one course of action, which none of them would ever speak differently about again once the news release had been revealed to the public.

  They had all taken one sacred vow. It was called CYA—“Cover your ass.”

  Alonzo Morgan had provided them with a convenient alibi, although not one of them—Alexandra, the mayor, Monica, or any of the community leaders and experts who attended the meeting—believed it.

  They had nevertheless agreed that Alonzo Morgan would become the foundation on which the official story would be built.

  He was something they could actually point to.

  Alonzo Morgan would be charged with fifty-two counts of murder, although he was dead. Two charges for Tracie Burlingame’s sons, Rashod Burlingame and Randi Burlingame. He was charged with the other fifty on the basis of his obsession with Tracie Burlingame and because the murders
all had an identical MO. The killing off of Tracie’s sons was only a cover for a sick mind to commit a mass murder.

  Alonzo Morgan was a psychotic serial killer. He had infiltrated the police force; therefore, he had access to considerable power. None of the department’s psychiatric evaluations, medical exams, or testing had indicated anything out of the ordinary with Alonzo.

  He was a cross-sociopath. Scientific evidence pointed to the fact that his type could seep right into mainstream society and appear as normal as the next person.

  The police were not fortune-tellers. They did the best they could, but they did not have the ability to peer into another person’s mind. There had been no indications. Alonzo Morgan had graduated in the top five of his class in the police academy. They had evidence of having done all the appropriate checks.

  It was an unfortunate incident, to say the least. In response to it, a more rigorous background check would be instituted in the future.

  Neither Alexandra nor the mayor of New York ever mentioned that they had discovered that he was also responsible for the murder of one Raymond Burlingame, Tracie Burlingame’s husband, some fifteen years before.

  Because they could not explain how Alonzo had managed to kill so many boys in the course of a single night, they connected him to a nationwide cult.

  They lied, saying they had corroborating testimony from protected sources, who placed themselves in imminent danger by linking others to the crimes—shadowy characters who had flown in, helped to commit the murders, and then disappeared.

  Because there was no blood found in the bodies, they concocted a story of a secret web of psychopaths that had a passion for drinking blood. They were modern-day vampires; that was why they had killed the boys.

  At the time of the publishing of the press release, Harlem Homicide, along with the FBI and CIA, had issued an international police warrant through Interpol for those persons who had participated in the murders that night.