by David Risen
He looked up at her and nodded at the body of Blake Rider.
“You should get him out of here. The sisters are in disarray, but you only have a few hours until this mountain will be crawling with Park Rangers and cops.”
His eyes lit with an idea. He held up a finger and then turned around and walked swiftly back into the shadows.
In a moment, she heard squeaky wheels on the concrete. The man in the building with her appeared from the shadows rolling a cart.
The sides of it looked to be made of canvass. It was about the length and width of a bathtub and about four feet deep with the words “U.S. Mail” painted on the dirty, white side of it.
As he approached her, she stumbled to her feet and backpedaled, covering the triangle of curly, brown hair over her pubic region.
The man stopped the cart a foot off to Rider’s right side, approached him and flipped him over on his belly, and then he proceeded to strip off his leather coat. He stood, turned, and held the coat out to her.
“Do you mind putting this on? Your nudity is tickling my inner rapist.”
Merissa barely heard him.
Her eyes had focused on the huge crater in the back of Rider’s head, and the missing skin on the back of his neck.
“Missy?”
She snapped out of it, took two steps forward, and doubling over and stretching as far as she could toward him without approaching too closely, she took the leather coat.
The man nodded and averted his eyes.
Merissa pulled the coat on over her shoulders and buttoned it, and then she looked at her new acquaintance again.
“Who are you?” she repeated.
The man looked at her and then eyed the body of the woman lying on her stomach a few feet away.
“You should take her skirt. She’s a little bigger than you, but it will fit enough to keep you from flashing any Park Rangers that might be about. Trust me,” he said with a wry grin.
“Some of those guys are not strangers to wickedness.”
Merissa stared after him a moment longer and then, giving him wide berth approached the body of the woman, unzipped her skirt and tugged it off.
The man in the building with her set about the task of rolling Rider over on his back, scooping him up like a small child, and lying him in place in the cart.
As Merissa stuffs her feet into the woman’s shoes – a pair of brown leather, lace-up shoes with two-inch, black heels, the man picks Ryder’s sword up from the ground and eyes it with a kind of respect and simultaneous disdain.
“Why are you helping me?
The man snapped out of it and placed the sword in the cart with Rider -- wiping his hands off as if he’d just handled something foul.
Then he turns and looks at Merissa. For a moment, his eyes glow green as he offers her a Damien Omen smile.
“The devil is in the details,” he said.
Merissa opens her mouth to follow up, but the man holds up his hands in a stop motion.
“You should take him to one of the empty houses around here – preferably one in the middle of a long neighborhood. If the Park Rangers get here and decide to start canvassing the area, that’ll give you a little time to get away.”
“Who are you?” she repeated for a third time, this time she wasn’t so sure that she wanted to know the answer.
The man laced his fingers together before his chest, almost as if he were about to pray, and he sighed.
“One day, a couple of years from now, maybe I’ll meet you somewhere and we’ll get a cup of coffee, and have a nice, long talk about me, but right now, I have a lot to do. And I want to get the hell out of here before shit gets real.”
“What happened here?”
The man shakes his head. “Take B.J. Baddass here, and find a nice, quiet little house. He’ll be waking up in an hour or two.”
Once Merissa had left, Lucifer directed his attention to the hundreds of shelves full of vaults, and smiled.
“Well guys, it was fun while it lasted, but we’ve reached that time of the evening. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”
He snapped.
Every vault on every floor in the building flew open, and the bodies within – hundreds of people the Sisters of Divinity deemed unfit to exist in mortality – flew to the floor. The scene within the building was much like what one might have seen upon entering a German concentration camp following the second World War.
Lucifer gave himself a self-congratulatory nod. “That should keep the witches busy for a while.”
He pondered his own assertion for a moment and then shook it off.
“Oh honey,” he called.
Lucifer began filing through the many metal shelves looking for the one vault that remained unopened. Once he searched the first floor, he moved on to the second, and then the third, until finally, on the fourth floor, he found the one.
It was smaller than the others and much older. The body of the vault was made of bronze – consistent with the age that the sisters captured her. Hundreds of arcane symbols remained etched in the dusty, corroded surface – some of the symbols worn away with time.
But the warning in the center of the vault door remained written in ancient Sumerian Cuneiform.
“Cursed be the fool who opens this prison.
Within lies a woman cursed by the one God for all time.
Her womb has borne pestilence and death for man.
Her heart holds disdain for all children of men.
Her hand and influence has murdered thousands.
He who looks within shall die, forthwith,
And shall endure the curse of damnation ever after.”
Lucifer made a wry grin, and then he snapped. The vault holding his spiritually betrothed opened, and Lucifer cast eyes on the ruins of the woman within for the first time since Adam roamed the Garden of Eden.
Lucifer’s eyes traced the lines of the mummified woman within and he chuckled.
“You’re looking a bit peckish, my dear. Perhaps we should find you something to eat.”
Lucifer laughed at his own wit, and then he cradled the body of his betrothed in his arms and carried her down the four flights of stairs to the first floor, through the lobby of the old refinery and later lumber mill, and out the front door.
On the front lawn of the old building, before the opened gate that once kept intruders from peeking, Lucifer lay “his girl,” as he called her down on the dead grass, and stroked her dark hair – her only remaining discernable feature.
Her eyes had long since rotted away as had the cartilage of her nose. Her lips were drawn in a high and tight O around her yellowed and rotten teeth.
Lucifer peered deep into the dark sockets where her eyes had once been and shook his head.
“How I’ve missed you!”
He leaned forward and kissed the mummy hard on the lips.
As he continued his long, slow embrace, the body beneath him fleshed out. The brown, leathery skin smoothed and turned olive. The straight and regal nose of a Mediterranean woman fleshed out where the triangular opening had been.
Liquid gathered in the empty eye sockets, and dried to reveal her dark, wide eyes.
Her lips relaxed from the O shape around her teeth and filled to the full, voluptuous shape of a woman from the middle east.
By the end of the embrace, Lilith lay beneath him with her arms wrapped around him.
Lucifer drew back and stared into the deep, dark jewels that were her eyes. “You’re every bit the vision that I recall,” he said in Ancient Sumerian.
“You’ve broken the curse of God?” she said in the same dialect.
Lucifer shook his head.
“The witches did the work for me.”
She ran her fingers through his hair. “I haven’t the words to describe the emptiness that I’ve felt,” she whispered.
Lucifer smiled.
“And it will never happen again.”
In the blink of an eye, Lucifer grew
to ten times his normal size.
Lilith’s eyes bulged with alarm. She rolled over and clawed her way toward the gate.
Lucifer grasped her in his giant hand, lifted her to his mouth, and swallowed her whole.
When the deed was done, he shrank to his normal size and grinned at his own wit. “Reunited, and it feels so good.”
He looked up to the sky.
“See that, fucker? Your final insult to me is now ended.”
He cupped his hand over his ear. “What’s that? Cat got your tongue?”
Lucifer turned his palms up. “Well, I’d love to stay here and shoot the shit, but I’ve got work to do.”
Amelia Long awoke shivering.
Overhead, a gray sky. Beneath her, Sod Grass as far as she could see to her left. To her right, a road ran past high up on a steep bank.
She climbed to her feet to find herself naked. She glanced about quickly looking for any signs of life, but no one was about.
She turned and looked behind her to find yet another road up a steep bank and the thick cover of leafless trees scarcely masked the tall houses of an upscale subdivision.
Amelia crossed her arms over her breasts, and jogged across the field of Sod Grass, up the bank, and into the trees.
Amelia charged up to the first house she saw and tried the door but it was locked fast.
She knelt and lifted the welcome mat.
No key.
She felt around the top of the door molding.
The front door swung open and an old woman with short but elegant white hair looked past the rims of her reading glasses and up to Amelia from her electric wheelchair.
Her eyes bulged as Amelia’s nudity registered.
Amelia went with it. “Please help me,” she cried.
“Come in,” the woman said, backing her wheelchair out of the way.
Amelia flung herself inside.
The old woman propelled the wheelchair forward again, and she slammed the front door and locked the bolt.
“Should I call the police?” she asked.
“No,” Amelia pleaded. “I just need some clothes, and I want to get as far away from here as I can.”
The old woman frowned. “But you have bruises all over you. You look like someone worked you over.”
Amelia shook her head. “I can’t remember. Do you have any clothes I can wear?”
The old woman’s sharp eyes danced about her lap as she considered the request, and then she spun her chair around.
“One moment please.”
She watched the old woman go, and she heard the whirring of the chair as it advanced through the house.
Amelia took the time to look around.
Though the house was not older than a decade, the furniture in the den looked like it came from the 1960s. The end tables to either side of the couch which stood on high legs that jutted out from the bottom of the old couch like radio antennas were decorated with doilies which were held down by lava lamps.
The mantle over the fireplace held numerous ceramic figures and to the wall left of it, a Hallmark calendar announced February 2015.
Amelia’s mouth fell open.
She wondered if the old woman simply hadn’t changed the calendar in over a year, or if somehow....
The woman returned with an outfit neatly folded along with a pair of black heels that looked as though they came from the 1990s.
“My daughter left these here the last time she visited. She’s about your size.”
“Thank you,” Amelia said taking the black skirt and blazer and white blouse from her hands and setting them down on the table before her.”
The old woman nodded. “My name is Murielle. I’m going to go make a pot of coffee and let you dress, and then we’re going to figure out what happened to you.”
The woman turned her chair around and motored back the way she came.
Once she was out of the room, Amelia dressed herself quickly in the white blouse, black blazer, and black skirt, and then she slid the heels on over her bare feet.
She glanced at herself in the mirror hanging above the mantle. She didn’t look terrible for someone who had just been in a fight with Lucifer only to wake up two years earlier.
She glanced back through the archway where her kind host disappeared. She heard the humming of the motor of the wheelchair working somewhere deep within the house, and then the muffled sounds of the woman’s voice.
“Yes, is this the police?”
A chord of terror surged through Amelia’s chest.
She turned, unbolted the front door, and thrusted herself back out into the gray day beyond, and she charged back toward the woods.
Blake Rider opened his eyes to find himself staring at white paint flaking off the paneling on a very old ceiling. He didn’t recall how he’d gotten here, or what he had been doing before.
He sat up, and a piece of paper fell from his chest and dropped to his lap.
As soon as he caught a glimpse of his clothing – the purple button-up shirt with jeans – it all came crashing back to him.
The hike up and down the mountain.
The ghosts.
The devil.
The purple shirt that he wore was tattered from the explosion of a frag grenade, sliced at his stomach from a fight with Aphrodite, singed from his battle with Hades.
Mud from his trek up and down the mountain caked the hem of his jeans.
He lifted the folded piece of paper from his lap and straightened it out.
Rider,
I haven’t known you very long, but I already have feelings for you. Already, you have saved my life twice, and given me back my freedom. But we can’t be. I’m still married, and I left my husband in a mess.
I can’t begin anything new without closing the door on that, and I at least, need to make some of the things I did to Rhett up to him.
I don’t want to leave you, but I believe that it’s the best thing for everyone, right now. I hope I’ll see you again, but for now, please don’t try to find me.
Raven.
Rider’s eyes welled up. He wadded the note up and tossed it in the corner of the room.
Amelia, he thought.
He found his black, leather coat drooped over a rotten chair downstairs. He pulled it on over his shoulders, and beneath it he found the physical abysmal spike.
He picked it up from the chair and slid it back into its scabbard, and then, with one last look at the ruins of the old mill house, he thrust himself out into the streets of Skitts Mountain Tennessee to track down Amelia.
The old ghost town was as quiet as a cemetery.
He marched down the road that the street sign called Whitaker Street, and paused for a moment once he reached the intersection of Whitaker and Main to look back up to the old Mill and Refinery.
Then he turned down main, passed the old bank, the rotting motel, the post office and café before finally reaching the old Standard Oil Station where he’d entered the city.
The dome of souls was gone, and he gasped as he saw the road beyond.
At least ten women dressed in various garments all with different fatal wounds involving sticks.
A brunet who looks to be no older than twenty-five with a two-foot sick protruding from her left eye socket.
A bleached blond who skewered herself on a three-foot stick planted into the ground. It appeared that she planted the stick and then simply bent into it. The stick ripped through her naval and poked all the way through her back.
A woman with short, dyed pink hair who shoved a stake made of a broken branch through her heart.
Rider knew who was responsible.
Lucifer.
He also knew that while Lucifer held a physical form, there would be many more.
But that wasn’t his problem.
He walked slowly through the field of corpses.
A few feet further down the road, he found the body of a Park Ranger with his head blown off.
Five feet further down a
nd on the left side of the broken old road, another woman was submerged into the ground all the way up to her neck. Her face had turned gray, and her mouth gaped open in a final cry.
Rider shook his head and pressed on.
In twenty minutes, he reached it.
The large, coin-shaped vault gleamed in the sunlight. On the left side of the road, Lucifer had impaled another Park Ranger on a broken tree. The sharp limb had worked its way through the man’s body now, and the jagged and bloody point of the tree trunk protruded from his open mouth.
Flies swarmed around the body.
A few feet before him, another Park Ranger lie on his back with his intestines ripped from his body. His left arm was missing, and it appeared to Rider that an animal had worked on the body over the course of the last few nights, because most of his abdomen was missing along with the rest of his internal organs.
Behind him sat the White F 250 with the green stripe down the sides announcing U.S. Park Ranger.
Then he saw what he came looking to find.
A few feet behind the Park Ranger truck, Amelia’s backpack lie on the ground in the approximate location where he last saw her. To the left of it, the clothes Rider last saw Amelia wearing all lay piled in a heap on top of one another.
It was the same outfit she bought new at the Old Navy store in Gainesville, Georgia just before the Sisters of Divinity nabbed him and reprogramed him to be Nick Carcer.
Purple Fleece zip-up jacket.
A long sleeve, black shirt with lettering on the front that read “Run, Rest, Repeat.”
Blue jeans flared at the bottom like bell bottoms.
Rider lifted the shirt to find that the clothes were full of ashes, and Amelia’s underclothes were still inside the shirt and the jeans, and her socks were still inside her shoes as if she had simply vaporized.
His eyes welled up.
Fury exploded in his chest.
The only person who had ever really loved him was gone.
Rider took Amelia’s backpack from the road, unzipped it, and inside he found a flashlight, the old navy shirt that she had bought him, the keys to the Pathfinder, the map, a compass, Amelia’s wallet full of prepaid debit cards and fake IDs, a compass, a .357 pistol, and his LG Leon that he bought through Metro PCS in South Carolina a few days ago.