by Jonas Saul
Chapter 14
The couple in the backseat couldn’t keep their hands off each other.
Mike had picked up the fare on Blue Jay Way by the Roger’s Centre and was taking them to an office party at the Xerox Centre on Bloor. The woman was hot, dressed in a tight red miniskirt. Her low-cut blouse left nothing to the imagination, the bottom of the V-neck just above her belly button.
As far as Mike could tell, she enjoyed the attention her partner lavished on her. Numerous possibilities ran through his mind on the ride. Was she an escort or his new girlfriend? Whatever she was, she was hot and Mike didn’t get a lot of fares as pretty as her, unless he got the calls for the strip clubs in town after they closed. Seemed like he was always one of the last ones to the clubs though, missing the better looking girls. He always ended up with the dancers who were drunk or high.
He tried to keep his eyes on the road. He wanted to give them privacy in his cab, but movement in his rearview mirror pulled his gaze toward the backseat time and again. Two blocks back, as the man leaned across her stomach and lowered below the seat, the woman had met Mike’s gaze in the mirror. Her top had sat open, both perky breasts completely exposed, sitting up at attention.
Mike had yanked his eyes away fast. He’d expected to be chastised, screamed at for being a pervert. But none of that happened. Instead, when he looked back in the mirror, the woman smiled at him, moaned, licked her lips and rolled a finger around her nipple.
Mike’s erection pushed to be released from his tight jeans. For the last two blocks, all he could do was stare in the mirror at the half-naked woman in the backseat of his cab while her male partner did something to her lower region. She stared back at Mike, teasing him, tempting him, asking him to join her with the look in her eyes.
It was all he could do to watch the road. The intersection of Yonge and Bloor was coming up. He had a green light. As soon as he was through the light he would have to pull over and let his fare out. This was his last chance to memorize the beauty in the back seat of his cab for later.
He looked in his mirror. She had both hands up, rolling her nipples between her thumb and forefinger, moaning even louder. She smiled and blew him a kiss. Mike smiled back.
The light at Yonge changed to yellow. Even though he didn’t want to end this ride too soon, he could still make the light. Either that or jam the brakes on and knock the guy in the backseat around.
He hit the gas. Just as he was about to enter the intersection, he looked in his mirror at the woman again.
That was when she screamed.
Not in ecstasy.
In fear.
Justin Flannagan was sick and tired of doing what he was told. Anna could go screw herself. She had cheated on him. Three years together, and all she ever wanted to do was control him and sleep around behind his back.
“Change this, change that,” he said out loud to the empty car. “Why do you say it like that?” he said, mimicking her voice in a high nasal pitch. “Why can’t you be normal like other guys? Fuck normal and fuck you, Anna. I’m so done.”
Three years and all he got was control, nagging, and bitching. Then he came home early and she had two guys in their bed. She chased him out to his run-down pickup truck in her bathrobe shouting something about how it wasn’t what he thought. She could explain everything.
“Yeah, right. Explain that?” he had yelled after her. “There’s no explanation for that’ll ever make sense. We’re through. It’s over.”
He’d jumped in his pickup and drove. It had been twenty minutes, and she had tried his cell phone seven times so far. He resolved to throw his cell out the window if she tried again. It was old and filled with pictures of her. Her image was on his screensaver and locked screen. He needed a new one anyway.
“Go ahead, whore, call me again. Call me one more time and I’ll fucking throw this phone out the window. You will never see me again, bitch.”
He continued west on Bloor, heading to the House of Lancaster. It was time for a little pussy for himself. He was going to get lap dance after lap dance on the bitch’s credit card. He’d already taken the maximum cash withdrawal on her card at the ATM. Now, with Anna’s money, he was going to buy pussy and no one would stop him.
Then he planned a late dinner. Maybe he would get a massage at a parlor on her credit card. They take credit. He’d checked. Later, when Anna got the card’s statement, she could see what he had done.
“Serves you right, bitch,” he yelled at his phone on the passenger seat. “You’ll learn to fuck with me.”
He slammed the steering wheel as his eyes glazed over. Up ahead the light changed to yellow.
His cell phone rang. He hit the gas to make the light and picked up the phone. Anna’s picture told him she was calling again. He turned to throw it out the window.
He entered the intersection to someone screaming at him just outside his window.
Then he was airborne.
Simon Peter and his fellow apostles watched as Waller’s F-150 collided with the Hummer. They recognized Sarah as she stepped out of the passenger side, walked a few feet, fired a gun in the air and then hid it behind her.
She continued walking toward them.
In their black overcoats, hiding by the unlit area of the wall nearest a corner of the intersection, it would be nearly impossible for her to see them.
“This is it, my brothers,” Simon said as he stared into the eyes of each one of his followers, the surprise evident on their faces. Every time Matthew’s information proved correct, even though it had saved their lives in the skydiving plane crash, they were stunned. “We all have our needles. It is time to Rapture Sarah Roberts. As it is written, it will be done. Spread out and run to the four corners. We advance as one and come at her in a way that she cannot escape again. We cannot fail our Lord. Now go.”
His brothers ran away, preparing for the end of Sarah Roberts.
The moment had finally come. He felt overjoyed with glee. His toupee firmly in place, white powder paste hiding his fair skin, Simon waited while his apostles got into position. Sarah continued up the middle of Yonge Street, heading directly for the intersection of Yonge and Bloor.
She must be dazed from the accident, he thought as she didn’t veer to the sidewalk. For some strange reason, she continued past the pedestrian crossing on Yonge, between two cars waiting at the red light and moved into the middle of the intersection.
Simon looked both ways. A taxi cab was coming from the west toward her back. A pickup truck was coming from the east.
Aghast, Simon turned back to Sarah, who now stood in the center of the road.
The light changed to yellow. Both the pickup and the taxi hit the gas to make the light.
Sarah didn’t move.
“No,” Simon yelled as he ran toward her.
From the corner of his vision he saw his apostles running at her, too. It appeared Brother Andrew and Brother James were going to get to her first.
Simon saw the needle sticking out of Brother James’ hand as he jumped at her from five feet away.
Sarah didn’t notice. Her eyes were closed.
From Simon’s vantage point, he saw the taxi driver realize that people were in the road, but it was too late. He swerved to miss Sarah, spun sideways, his bumper sliding past Sarah by no more than half a foot and smacking dead on into James’ legs. Brother James had been in the act of jumping at Sarah so that he could jam the needle into her neck when the cab hit him sideways. He catapulted onto the trunk of the taxi, his head exploding red spray out the top as he continued in an uncontrolled sideways summersault. He landed in the road on the other side of the cab as the taxi’s wheels caught something on the road and flipped sideways.
Brother Simon stopped running and jumped back out of reflex just as the pickup truck barreled past him, doing at least seventy. It spun away from Sarah and hit the backside of the taxi, raising the pickup’s front end in the air.
Someone screamed.
The pick
up’s engine revved high as it flew over the back of the taxi. Brother Andrew had been running into the street beside Brother James. He had dodged the taxi’s approach and stopped to stare at the inert form of Brother James on the asphalt.
The front bumper of the airborne pickup connected with Brother Andrew’s chin, lifting him in the air and almost decapitating him. When Brother Andrew landed on the cement, Simon could tell he was dead.
The engines of both vehicles revved as they approached Sarah in the intersection. She closed her eyes and waited. Every part of her screamed to run. She wanted to open her eyes, to get to safety, but she had to fight her urges. When Vivian told her to do something, she didn’t ask why. She had saved countless lives listening exactly to every word Vivian had offered. Now it was time to save her own.
Vivian wouldn’t ask Sarah to kill herself. That couldn’t be what this was about. Her sister had inside information and when Sarah signed on for this automatic writing thing almost six years before, she didn’t come aboard half-heartedly. She jumped on with both feet and fully committed.
It was that commitment that allowed her to not only stand still and keep her eyes closed while her primal urges begged her to run, but to also smile.
It’s all in how you face it, she thought.
Tires screeched behind her somewhere. Her reflexes ordered her to spin on her heels, duck, move out of the way. Anything but stand in the middle of the road.
But all she did was open her eyes. She barely had time to register the back end of a taxi brush by her leg, ruffling her pants. People on the sidewalk stood open-mouthed, watching.
The pickup truck ten feet away bore down on her. She barely had time to scream as she stepped sideways to the right, out of its path. The driver must’ve seen the taxi sliding at him, but it was too late. The pickup hit the backside of the cab and rose in the air, hitting a man who had been standing behind Sarah. It momentarily lifted the man off his feet by his head. The man dropped to the ground, his head barely attached.
The pickup landed on all four wheels and skidded to a halt. Sarah’s knees unhinged. She dropped to the pavement, shook her head to rid her mind of the images and then looked up at the black overcoats.
The man who got hit in the head had been right behind her.
His face was white, covered in powder.
They’re here.
She spun and checked her surroundings. If one of those white-faced men got too close, she would die. She knew this and now understood what Vivian had done. By standing in the road, two vehicles speeding to make a yellow light had collided. That accident had taken out an attacker.
She got to her feet, legs shaking.
Another man in an overcoat lay on the cement, his head leaking dark liquid.
Correction. Two white-faced men down.
The taxicab’s backdoor opened and a man stepped out on shaky legs. A woman followed, her hair ruffled from the accident. She adjusted her top and pulled up her skirt. The driver of the cab got out and walked around his cab to examine the damage.
The pickup driver exited his vehicle from the other side of the intersection.
Then two men in black overcoats and white faces stood from a kneeling position behind the taxi where they had been examining their friend.
Anger surged through her.
“Who are you?” she asked from a dozen feet away.
“Good evening, Sarah Roberts,” the ugly one with the protruding forehead said. “We are the Rapturites. We’ve come to take you home. Won’t you join us?”
“What the fuck …” She took a step back. Then another.
They advanced.
A siren blared in the distance.
She reached for the weapon in her waistband, then remembered what Vivian had said. Sarah couldn’t use the gun. She couldn’t kill them.
But I can end this right here, right now. I can shoot them in the feet and leave them to the cops.
She brought her hands back to her sides. She had to listen to her sister.
Shit.
The ugly one waved to her. “Come, join us in Rapture. The time is upon us.”
“Yeah, sure,” she shrugged. “Okay, but first, I gotta go down to the whorehouse and talk to your mother. Looks like you’ve been a bad boy and stolen her makeup again.”
Ugly smiled. He got uglier. She cringed.
“If we miss you now, we’ll keep coming. Nothing of this earth can stop us. We fear no one.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“It’s because of you that we’ve done this.”
“Don’t blame me for you being an asshole. I didn’t cover you in asshole dust and force you two to be such idiots.” She almost tripped, then righted herself. “You came after me, remember, dickhead.”
Sarah kept the distance to ten feet or more as she continued to back down Bloor Street, both men still advancing. Someone yelled at her that she had to stay at the scene of the accident. Another man had started to follow them, curious what was happening.
“At the mall earlier today, did you kill all those cops because you have no fear? Is that what this is? Why are you after me in the first place?”
“Because you’re one of the good ones. You help people.”
“That’s your logic for wanting to kill me—I mean Rapture me?”
“Yes, God only wants the chosen few before Armageddon begins.”
She looked skyward. “See what fame gets you?” She sidestepped an idling parked car. The intersection had filled with people wanting to help. It was a standstill now. The sirens were closer.
“No more running, Sarah. Come to us and we’ll end this.”
She passed an opening to a back alley that led between the stores. She stopped walking backwards. She looked down at her feet and saw a cell phone lying there. Quickly, she picked it up. Its glass screen was cracked and one corner was dented, but it looked like it still worked.
“Yeah, okay,” Sarah said. “I’ll just walk over there and let you kill me. What are you? Fucking crazy, numbnuts?”
She tossed the phone in her pocket and ran down the alley as fast as her legs could pump. At the corner, she turned right. In seconds she was back on Yonge Street, close to where Waller had smashed into the Hummer.
Detective Waller was being helped out of the driver’s seat. He hadn’t seen her yet.
She pivoted left and started down Yonge as fast as she could, dodging bystanders, hopping over a fire hydrant, trying to put as much distance between her and the men in overcoats.
Half a block down, she looked back but couldn’t see them anymore.
Farther south, at her hotel where Waller had picked her up, the Buick was attached to a tow truck. They were lifting the front end, getting ready to move it off the street.
She ran through the hotel lobby and hit the stairs. At her room, she ran into the bathroom and threw up in the toilet. She sprawled on the cool tile and breathed in deep, trying to stave off another burst.
She couldn’t.
It took three more clenches of the stomach to empty its contents. Her limbs shook and her stomach ached. She needed energy. She needed food.
The phone in her pocket rang. She pulled it out and saw the cracked image of a pretty girl calling.
Sarah hit the answer button.
“Hello?”
“Who’s this?” the girl asked.
“Not saying,” Sarah mumbled. “Too worn out to care.”
“Then, can you just tell Justin I’m sorry. You can have fun with him if that’s what he needs to make things right. But then he should come home.”
“Girl, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Sarah hung up the phone and set it on the floor.
She needed to find out who the Rapturites were and what they wanted with her. How could they find her so easily? Are they getting help?
Her arm numbed.
She crawled out of the bathroom and grabbed the pad and paper from the nightstand.
Then she bl
acked out.
She woke to a note written with urgency. Either that or Vivian had channeled through her weakened body and what amounted to scribbles was all that came of it.
A man named Matthew was working through someone named Simon Peter. Vivian couldn’t explain all the details. All she could tell Sarah was that Simon Peter channels his brother.
Simon Peter is an Automatic Writer, just like Sarah.
“Holy shit.”
Sarah deduced the rest. Since she had used her abilities to make things right and help people, she had become known. It had given her notoriety. She guessed this was something Simon wanted and was jealous of her for it. Killing Sarah under some religious guise gave him a chance to be the only Automatic Writer out there.