Malevolent

by David Risen

  Rider stood slowly. Amelia turned her back and peeled her tan trench coat off. She craned her head over her shoulder.

  “You don’t have time to ogle me, get dressed, and keep your eyes to yourself.”

  Rider stared after her a moment longer, and then she began to unbutton her blouse.

  He turned away and dropped his leather coat to the asphalt, and then he stripped off his blue shirt, and his white tee shirt.

  That’s when he realized that he felt no pain in his hand from the cracked knuckle.

  He glanced over his shoulder at Amelia in time to see her strip her shirt off. He averted his head fast.

  “What did you do to me?”

  “Consider it a token of my gratitude,” she said.

  Rider turned around. Inside the bag, he found a navy sweatshirt with a horizontal gray stripe across the chest, a navy zip up hoodie with “Old Navy,” stitched across the chest in white semi-cursive letters, and a pair of charcoal, boot cut jeans that looked as though someone wore them out before they came to him.

  He ripped the tags off the clothes, sat, stripped off his boots and jeans, and dressed, and then they tossed their old clothes in the dumpster.

  By the time they made it out of the alley, the police had closed off the exits of the shopping center.

  They ducked into a Starbucks while the cops canvassed the area. Amelia ordered a white chocolate mocha latte, and Rider went with an Espresso. Two sips into it, Rider realized that caffeine, guilt, and adrenaline were not a good combination when the cops had you holed up.

  Amelia sat down and tore into an AT&T bag. She pulled out a Motorola box and pulled a smartphone from within. It was dark outside now, and snow flurries fluttered in each time someone opened the door.

  “What’re you doin’ now?” Rider snapped.

  She glanced up at him. “Craig’s List. We need a car.”

  He huffed. “That’s dangerous, you know.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  The front door opened whisking in a frosty breath of air from outside. Two Hall County Sheriff’s Deputies sauntered inside, and surveyed the packed house.

  Rider tensed.

  Amelia leaned forward and touched his hand.

  Relax and act casually.

  Rider took a deep breath and released it slowly, and then he leaned forward and took another sip of his Espresso.

  The deputies split up and began going from table to table.

  Rider peered at Amelia who seemed completely engrossed in her new phone.

  He touched her hand. She looked up from the screen and gave him an irritated grimace.

  What do we tell them?

  We’re here shopping. We’re both from Oakwood. If he asks why we both have temporary IDs we’ll tell him that our bags were stolen while we were on vacation. Nothing bad will happen if you relax.

  Rider took another sip of his espresso.

  “’Scuse me, sir?” The cop to his right said.

  Rider nearly spit out his espresso. He looked right to find a cop with a fifty-pound table muscle standing beside him. Thin brown hair, thin scraggly mustache.

  “Yes, sir?” Rider said.

  Amelia still sat across from him engrossed in her new phone. She hadn’t even bothered to look up.

  “There’s been an incident here tonight. I was wondrin’ if you might’ve seen somethin?”

  Amelia looked up. “I saw the police cars in the parking lot. What’s going on?”

  The cop bunched his lips and shook his head. “We’re still puttin it all together. What time did you get here?”

  Amelia shook her head. “We weren’t paying attention. We’re on vacation right now, so time’s not really important.”

  He frowned, “Well, you have to have some idea.”

  She shrugged. “I suppose it was sometime around five?”

  “Seen anybody wondrin’ around here? We’re lookin for a man and a woman, and the man may have been shot.”

  She gave him a look of concern. “No, I think I would have remembered that.”

  The deputy-sheriff eyed her clothes and then Rider’s.

  “Nice outfits,” he grunted. “They new?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “Our bags were lost at the airport. That’s why we’re out shopping.”

  “You two from around here?”

  Rider was trying not to look at him, and the deputy was growing more suspicious by the moment. Every cell in his body wanted to jump up and fly out the door.

  “Yes,” she said. “We just came back from a week’s stay in Hawaii.”

  The deputy chuckled. “That must be nice. Didn’t get much of a tan, though.”

  She shook her head. “We were there on business.”

  “You got any ID?”

  Amelia nodded, and reached in her purse. Then she passed the fake document over to the Deputy-sheriff.

  His beady eyes danced over the document for a moment, and then he looked back at her.

  “So you just got this?”

  She nodded. “Our documents were in our luggage.”

  He squinted at her. “But your credit cards weren’t?”

  “Mine wasn’t. Is there a problem?”

  He studied her a moment longer, and then he keyed his shoulder microphone.

  “FIRE!” someone screamed.

  The deputy gasped and looked toward the counter.

  “Everyone outside,” one of the managers said.

  Amelia grabbed her things. Rider stood.

  The deputy passed her fake license back and started toward the door.

  Rider eyed the counter to find flames licking the drive thru wall. Amelia grabbed his hand and led him toward the door. A minute later, they stood outside.

  She led him up the embankment before the Starbucks and quickly up the road.

  “What are we doing?” he said.

  “We’re getting lost.”

  “What if they see us?”

  She frowned. “Just be quiet and walk fast.”

  “Hey!” a gruff voice yelled behind them.

  Rider turned and looked down the embankment. The fat cop waddled swiftly toward them.

  Amelia turned his head toward her by pressing her palms against each side of his face.

  “I will do something drastic now, and it will drain me for a while. You must take us to the Wal-Mart and look for a man driving a white 1982 Corolla with a blue vinyl top. Drive it, make sure that the VIN numbers match on the title and the car, and pay him no more than $1,000 for it. The money is in my wallet.”

  “What?”

  Amelia hugged him and closed her eyes.

  A shockwave of energy exploded from her, and everything around them including the fat cop froze.

  Amelia stared back at him blankly.

  He looked back at the cop frozen in mid stride along with the crowds outside Starbucks and all the nearby traffic as if someone had pressed the pause button on a DVD.

  Rider fished her new phone out of her purse and found Google maps pulled up. Wal-Mart was only a short walk in the direction she was leading him.

  He took her hand and tugged her down Shallowford Road.

  When he arrived at Wal-Mart, the spell seemed to have worn off.

  Amelia followed him along catatonically as if she were having the mother of all daydreams.

  As promised, he found the man with the white 1982 Corolla idling behind a small shopping center just out in front of the Gainesville Super Wal-Mart. He drove it around the parking lot, checked the VIN on the title against the VIN on the car, and paid the man. The man took off without removing his tag.

  Rider cycled through the open browsers on her phone and found that she already began the process of getting insurance. He entered the VIN and paid, and then he piled her in the car, and pointed it out of town – stopping at a package store called Legg’s for a fifth of Jack Daniel’s.

  Just after eleven, Rider pulled the old Corolla into the rough, empty parking lot of the Georgianna Motel. He
touched Amelia’s shoulder, but she still stared straight out the dirty windshield as if she were having the mother of all daydreams.

  The Georgianna Motel was an old brick one-story motel that looked like something out of the late 50s or early 1960s.

  Steel girders painted mint green supported the porch above the rooms, and a rod iron rail was welded in between them painted gloss black.

  He reached in her purse and pulled out a crisp C note, and then he went to the office and rented two rooms. Then he led her to one of the two rooms he rented, opened the door, and dragged her into the stuffy space with mismatched curtains. He lay her down in bed and switched on the 1980s era Television.

  He was about to turn out of the room and head to his own when she sat up, and looked at him. Her eyes were still a bit glossy, and she looked exhausted.

  “Where are we?”

  Rider frowned. “At a cheap motel on the way out of Gainesville. I didn’t want to drive any longer than I had to.”

  She nodded.

  “Did you buy the car?”

  He shrugged. “It’s an ancient piece of shit, but it runs. Are you okay?”

  She sighed. “A little lost. How is your mood?”

  He huffed. “I just killed three people, and the cops are out to get me.”

  “Touché.”

  He stared at her a moment longer, and then he started for the door.

  “I’m gonna go get sloshed, and go to sleep.”

  She nodded. “We’ll decide what to do next in the morning.”

  Rider opened the door.

  “Rider?”

  He turned back to face her.

  She gave him a look of condolence. “Don’t be too hard on yourself. The men we dealt with today were not good people.”

  Rider shook his head.

  “Yeah, and how would you know that?”

  “They were professionals. Their job, this time, was to abduct us and take us back to the sisters, but they’ve also killed.”

  Rider shook his head and sighed. “What they’ve done is on them; what I do is on me.”

  She looked down. “Yes, but these men are much more akin to the one that tampered with your brakes.”

  Rider glowered at her. “What do you know about that?”

  She glanced at him and then she looked down at the tiled floor. “As much as you do. That it was probably the CEO of Coleman Construction, but no one will ever prove it.”

  Rider pressed his lips together and nodded. “I’m gonna go get drunk. Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight,” she responded.

  As soon as Rider closed the door to his room, he pressed his back against it and sank to the floor.

  A bloody hand reaching for him from the back of his ruined Escalade.

  Begging, surprised blue eyes behind a ski mask as the blood drained from his carotid.

  Darren Coleman, a fat, middle-age man with barely a wisp of gray hair covering the top of his head grinning smugly as he and his lawyer step into the police station.

  Rider published an exposé on the questionable practices of the company. He was responsible for several investigations on state officials, who were apparently accepting under-the-table money in exchange for no-bid contracts on schools, jails, and other large public facilities Coleman Construction built.

  It wasn’t enough that they cheated their competition but they also cheated taxpayers as well. Almost all of the facilities they built were sub-par, and as such, they cost city and state governments tens of thousands in upkeep and repairs almost instantly.

  Rider’s article was responsible for putting the company out of business, indicting several public officials, and starting criminal investigations against the investors of the company, not the least of whom was Darren Coleman.

  The entire time the police interviewed him about Rider’s wreck, he had a devil-may-care attitude. At the end of the interview, he and his lawyer stood, and Darren Coleman simply said, “Prove it.”

  Unfortunately, they could not.

  Shortly thereafter, Coleman struck a deal on his bribery charges that allowed him to skate by with only five years in a minimum security, white-collar prison.

  He was already about to make parole.

  They might as well take out an add on several billboards with Coleman’s smiling mug and the caption, “Be a bad guy. You’ll make millions, and the penalty is laughable.”

  Three years in Club Fed for cheating the hell out of taxpayers, killing his daughter, wrecking his marriage, and destroying his career.

  The thought of it made him shake with fury.

  Rider took the bottle in the brown, paper bag by his right leg, screwed off the cap, and took a hefty swig.

  Before he finished half the bottle, he was asleep.

  Blindness.

  The sound of his own frantic breathing.

  “Amelia?” he cried.

  Only silence responded.

  He rolled right but chains around his hands and ankles snapped tight.

  Rider felt drugged. He had no energy.

  A bright spotlight snapped on above his head. He averted his eyes.

  “Just calm down, Rider,” a youthful voice said.

  He recognized it instantly.

  Sister Claire Jacobs.

  She looked less like a youthful nun now and more like what she was – a witch. She wore a velvety, red ceremonial robe with a gold flourish design. A thick gold chain dangled from her neck with the same pentacle design in gold and silver swinging toward his face.

  “So you’re calling her Amelia now,” she said. “I guess that means she managed to tell you something about herself.”

  “Where is she?” he barked.

  She gave him a sad look.

  “To be honest, we don’t have the power to take her on directly. Not anymore.”

  Rider struggled against his bonds, but he seemed to be growing weaker rather than stronger. The chains felt as though they weighed a ton. He couldn’t even manage to move them an inch now.

  “What did you do to me?” he snapped.

  She caressed his left cheek like a lover.

  “You’re inside a ward of protection. The alcohol has already worn off.”

  “Why?” he pleaded.

  She stood and paced out of his view.

  “After we spoke yesterday, I realized that this situation was too far out of control. Even if you were to back off, for now, you’d eventually start answering questions that we don’t need you to ask.”

  He glowered in her direction. “You don’t know me.”

  She stepped back over him. “You’re a journalist. By nature, you’re inquisitive. You’ve stumbled into something here that is far beyond your comprehension, and it will bring you in contact with forces that would use you to destabilize that which must not be disturbed.

  His heart pounded.

  “So you’re going to kill me now?”

  She shook her head.

  “We’re not evil, Rider. We provide a service for all mankind that the world does not need to know about.”

  He laughed humorlessly.

  “That’s the biggest crock of shit I’ve heard in years.”

  She gave him a stern look. “The fact that you would say that is proof of how successful we’ve been in re-educating the public. We sisters have existed for thousands of years keeping man safe from perils that he thinks are only fiction. Do you think I enjoy this?”

  Rider tried to give her a mean look but even the muscles on his face were now so weak that they didn’t want to cooperate.

  She paced out of his view again.

  “I would gladly give up what power I have to not hold the terrible knowledge that burdens me – knowledge I must use to maintain the balance so that your children and grandchildren can be safe and live their lives.”

  He smirked – barely.

  “I don’t have any children, remember?” His speech was slurred now as if he were three sheets to the wind. “And you took my wife.”

&
nbsp; She stepped back over him, nodded, and smiled brightly. “I know. You have nothing to live for and nothing to lose, which brings me to why we’re here.”

  She knelt and touched his face again. He turned his head.

  “You can’t know what we do or to what end we are empowered, but you should know that I considered you important enough to clear my entire schedule and pull a lot of strings to bring you here and set your mind at ease. I’m not going to kill you.”

  “So you’re gonna bore me to death?”

  She smiled and stood. “I’ve flown a very special member of our order down here to show you that we mean you no harm.”

  She extended her hand to someone behind her. “It’s okay,” she said to his unseen peer. “Come on.”

  A woman appeared from somewhere deep in the room. She wore a brown, hooded robe with a green flourish design – much like the one Sister Jacobs wore. The talisman of the Sisters of Divinity also hung from her neck suspended by a thick gold chain.

  Sister Jacobs pulled her hood down from the point at the crown of her head.

  Lauren.

  Rider’s eyes welled up.

  “Why?” he demanded.

  A tear rolled down Lauren’s cheek.

  “I didn’t mean for you to get involved in this,” she lamented.

  Rider looked away from her – trying to choke back his own emotions.

  “The horrors Sister Jacobs deals with in one day is enough to drive most people instantly crazy,” Lauren said. “She’s not going to hurt you; it’s her job to protect you.”

  Rider wanted to strangle her.

  “Yeah, then why am I in chains?” he barked.

  She looked down at the concrete floor.

  “For your own good.”

  She looked up at him with her eyes glistening in the dim light. “She brought you here to take away your pain, your alcoholism, addiction to drugs, and to save you from the very real danger you’ve put yourself in.”

  Rider scowled at Sister Jacobs as best he could. “How did you manage to brainwash her?”

  Sister Jacobs took a step toward him. “She’s not brainwashed. She works with us so that your way of life is safe from all of those who would end it.”