Part 4
At the animal howl, Cody's mind screamed in fear. Something was wrong here, terribly wrong, and he now wanted nothing more than to collect his wife and kids and get the hell out of Amelia City. Hearing such a sound in the middle of a city of this size struck him as unnatural and portentous.
He should have listened to that priest, Cody thought. Again he thought of leaving, but he couldn't yet risk the wrath of the family. He and Judy and the kids were stuck.
Kelly's internal reaction was similar to Cody's, though it would take wild horses to drag such an admission from her.
Judy wanted to hide out in the RV with the kids until the whole trip was over.
Gina, Adam's wife, just wanted to get her husband to pay some attention to her for a change, instead of their kids or his father's sermons.
And Adam, the youngest of Ted's sons and the most like him? He wanted to chase down the priest and beat him within an inch of his life. There resided in him a hatred for his father's enemies that often bordered on the psychotic, though few would ever guess that it sometimes slipped beyond that border into the realm of taking violent action.
In high school, Adam had overheard a couple of classmates making crude jokes about his father possibly being a closeted homosexual himself. Adam had said nothing, though they were clearly speaking loudly enough for him to hear. He'd returned their scorn by cutting the brake lines of the ringleader's car.
The boy and his friends crashed on the way home from school, ramming into the back of a semi at a stop light. The ringleader and his friend in the front seat were killed on impact.
Adam's self-justification? 'Honor thy father'. He felt no remorse for what he'd done, and God had provided by keeping the authorities from looking too carefully at the wreckage. As such, they never even suspected foul play.
Adam had spent most of the day playing with the kids, all nine of them essentially left to his and Gina's care, except for Rita, Cody and Judy's thirteen-year-old, who helped out with the younger kids. There wasn't much choice, as Gina had her hands full with Troy, their seven-month-old son.
She had tried his patience mightily the day before the trip out west, trying to convince him that they shouldn't come. The basis of her argument was that Troy was still too young for such trips, that taking care of him on the road would prove too much trouble. When he told her that the rest of the family would help, she had changed direction and pointed out that the entire group had been essentially threatened by the weirdo who'd shown up at the church.
The police had an obligation to prevent any violence against them, he'd reasoned. Even if they didn't agree with the protest, the cops of Amelia City would have no choice but to respond if the congregation felt threatened.
Her final gambit had been to simply say that she didn't want to go, and Adam had quickly pointed out that a good Christian wife cleaves to her husband. He wanted to go, therefor, they were going. Any point of contention she ever tried with him got answered with scripture or quotes from his father- there essentially was no winning him over on anything.
Take, for instance, the multiple crucifixes which festooned the walls of their home. He hung at least two in every room. Many of them were decorative, though some few were very plain. He kept a small box of hand-sized wooden crosses in the back of the van, all carved by his own hand. Sometimes he sold them for extra money here or there, especially on trips like this.
She'd begged him to ease up on them, but he hadn't even given her request the time of day, just kept right on making them. Even now he was busy showing some to their visiting supporters, only minutes after the priest had left.
Gina sighed, nipping up into the RV to check on Troy in his Pack-n-Play. He was fast asleep, but he'd be up in an hour or so for a change and feeding before zonking for the night. She looked down at her son and thought about Butch and Beverly, both missing far too long. Kelly's husband she could care less about- she suspected he was up to no good lately. But Beverly, despite her radical adherence to Ted's dogma, was usually good company. She hoped Bev was all right.
All in all, things were about to get worse for the True Power Baptist Church.
**
Father Sternin saw his breath cloud in front of his mouth before he felt the unnatural chill filling the car. As he slowed to a stop at a red light, his eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror. There he saw the wizened, bearded face of a man with hair only around the sides and back of his head. The newcomer's eyes were purest black.
"Your attempt to interfere will fail, holy man," the stranger rumbled in his booming baritone. "They will not heed your caution." Father Sternin met the gaze in the mirror- if he looked over his shoulder, he knew, the dark visitor would be gone.
"It's in God's hands now. I've done what I could."
"You could always try again," the stranger said with a wide smile.
"No. So long as I don't involve myself any further, I am safe from you and your kind."
"For now," the stranger snarled. "Your grace period will soon be over, holy man, and when it is, we will come for you again. You won't see us, won't hear us, not until it is too late! And then, priest," the stranger hissed, leaning forward so that his bearded mouth brushed against Father Sternin's ear, his chains rattling. "Then not even your precious God can save you."
Just as silently as he had appeared, the stranger named Marek slid into the shadows of the back seat and was gone.
**
Adam had decided to take his box of hand-crafted crosses down the street to sell them to the milling clusters of city denizens walking the benighted streets, and nobody had thought to stop him. His father seemed to swell with pride, in fact. "You know no fear, son, and go out to spread the word and help provide for this congregation and your family. God bless you, Adam!"
Ted Jenkins had chosen not to speak to his fear for his son's safety. It simply wouldn't do to let everyone know how worried he was over Beverly and Butch's absences. He no longer believed they were safe in Amelia City, and they hadn't even been in the city for 24 hours. If neither of their missing members returned before morning, he would contact the police.
The children, Adam had noted earlier, had become strangely subdued as evening fell upon the region. Even his own son, only seven months old, became less fussy and more wide-eyed, simply staring up at his mother and the world around him. Adam wrote it off as fatigue from the trip and all of their hijinks at the park near the hotel. They were all already asleep in the RV and the roomy back of the van.
Adam had walked two blocks down from the hotel and set up his box and a little sign, 'Hand Crafted Crucifix- $2.00' balanced against the open lid. In just a few minutes he sold four of them, smiling at his customers and offering them a blessed evening as they parted.
He had been there half an hour according to his watch when a dense, bluish fog began to roll slowly into the area. Adam shivered against a sudden drop in the temperature, checking his watch once more. It read 8:20. He looked up from his watch, startled to find that the fog had thickened to such a density that he could see no further than ten to fifteen feet in any direction.
"Time to head back," he said to himself, turning to close the box and go back to the RV. Yet when he looked down, the box was gone, the sign abandoned on the sidewalk. "What the hell? Who steals crosses," he asked, looking out into the fog. Something moved close by, just beyond his field of vision. "Hello? Hey, who's there?" He took a couple of steps forward, the fog inching in around him. "If you took my crosses, just give them back and there won't be any trouble."
"The only trouble here is that which you're in, my boy," called a rumbling baritone from the vicinity behind him. Adam spun, just in time to see the cloaked, chain-wearing stranger's fist crash into his temple. Everything went black and cold.
How long he was unconscious, Adam didn't know, but he awoke in a dank, shadowy cavern lit by a pair of lamps several yards away in front of him. He stood shackled against a rock wall, his arms and legs bound by chains, his upper torso held upright by a clamp around his throat. The cave was midwinter cold, his breath clouding before his blurry eyes. The scent of cinnamon clung to his nostrils.
A rattling of chains brought his attention around to the right. His neck was stiff, as if he'd been in his constraints unconscious for a while. The cloaked weirdo stood a few yards away, Adam's box of crosses on a litte rolling cart next to him.
"These are splendid creations, my boy," he boomed, plucking one out. He turned it this way and that, admiring the wood. "Some of these are ash. That's a very noble wood, rife with the potential for power. But I felt the need to modify them a little," he said, sliding towards Adam, twirling the cross like a knife fighter. When he stood before Adam, fearful sweat beading his forehead, the stranger flipped the cross up in front of Adam's face to reveal a stake-like point. "This is better for my purposes."
The stranger flashed Adam a leering smile and flipped the cross. He then let out a holler and stabbed the sharpened cross into Adam's outstretched left arm. Adam howled, blood spurting to the floor, his body trembling in its constraints. The stranger laughed, a tittering, womanly laugh that cut off Adam's screams momentarily.
The stranger took up another cross after the cart rolled over to him, seemingly on its own. "You see, the tools of one's trade are important, Adam. Used properly, the tools of your trade could spread love." He reached into the box, and withdrew an old, battered leatherbound bible with his free right hand. He held the bible and cross up for Adam to see. "Yet, you misuse your tools, and make of them weapons."
The stranger, despite Adam's growing, gibbering protests, settled the point of the cross-stake over the nerve in his right bicep, then hammered the head of the cross with the bible. The cross-stake ripped a bloody, painful path through muscle and flesh, scraping over bone as it punched clean through. More scarlet burst out, dripping rapidly onto the stone floor.
"Please," Adam begged after he regained control of his shuddering. Tears and snot streaked his face. "Please stop, I'm sorry, I don't know what you want or what I did, but I'm sorry!"
"What I want?" The stranger took out another cross and knelt down, holding the tip just over Adam's exposed left foot. "I want to see the world of mankind brought screaming and laughing in its own rabid foam down into a pool of its blood." He used the bible to once again hammer the cross home, pinning the foot to the stone floor. Through fresh screams, the stranger intoned, "As for what you did, well, it's that you were very, very human."
"P-p-please, s-s-stop," Adam stammered, body quivering.
"Those boys whose breaks you cut couldn't stop," the stranger said evenly. "You saw to that, Adam. And before you can ask, no, this isn't about that. This isn't about justice or karma or creating balance. This just is, Adam, and do you know why?" Adam shook his head slightly, and the stranger leaned up close, until the bristles of his beard tickled Adam's cheek and throat. "Because your God cannot stop us."
The stranger then rapidly pulled out two more cross-stakes, burying one in Adam's groin and another in his stomach. One more he drew from the box, using his free hand to push Adam's head back, keeping him from choking on the throat brace. "Ashes to ashes, Adam. Ashes to ashes."
The sharpened tip rammed through Adam's left eye so fast that it pierced the brain before the optic fluid and blood began to drip out like a teardrop.
**
Kelly was asleep on one of the couches in the den in the RV when Gina stepped up inside. She shook Kelly roughly by the shoulders, her own hands shaking horribly. When Kelly came to, she saw smears of mascara under her sister-in-law's eyes and knew fresh fear.
"It's Adam," Gina sobbed. "He's missing now too, same as Butch and Beverly. We gotta get the kids and get out of here, Kelly. Something bad happened to them, I just know it!"
"Wait a minute," Kelly said, pushing herself up into a sitting position. "You don't know that anything's wrong," she began, but Gina quickly thrust something in front of her. It was one of Adam's shoes. Kelly's regard slowly climbed up her sister-in-law to the woman's face again. "Where did you find it?"
"Just down the street. He was going to sell some of his crosses. But the box is gone, his sign is gone, and this shoe was the only trace of him there."
"We'll tell daddy, have him call the police," Kelly said, getting up and heading for the door.
"No! We call them after we're on the road, Kelly. For God's sakes, we're here to tell the cops here that one of their own was a worthless human being because he was gay! Do you not fucking get it? They're not going to help us unless we leave!"
Gina's shouts woke up the children and Judy, who was sleeping in the reclined driver's chair. All eyes were on Gina, a scrawny, quiet woman so much of the time, looking like a bedraggled rag doll now. She still clutched Adam's shoe in her left hand.
"What's going on in there," Ted called out, coming from his and Barbara's hotel room in blue-and-white striped boxers and a gray bathrobe. He cinched the robe shut as he stood on the first step up into the RV, and scowled at Gina. His scowl lightened after he took out his glasses and put them on, but still he looked irked.
"Mr. Jenkins," Gina said, her voice wavering, holding the shoe out to him silently. He blinked at it, then up at her, confused. "It's all I can find of Adam. Someone is after us," she said quietly. "We should have listened to the priest. We have to get out of here."
Cody, who'd been sleeping in the front passenger seat near his wife and had heard Gina first enter the RV to begin with, now stepped closer to the edge of the main cabin, Judy right at his right shoulder, slightly behind him. "Dad, I'm with Gina on this one. We were expected, and we were warned not to come here."
"By a heathen pervert in a cloak," his father shot right back at Cody. Now his forehead bunched as he frowned at his middle son. "We're not leaving. God's work must be done," he shouted, waggling a finger skyward. "Clearly the Almighty is testing us! Will you fail, Cody? You, Kelly? Or you, Gina?"
"Not me, daddy," said Kelly, slipping past her father, out of the RV. She poked her head past him for a moment and called in, "Bobby! Get your brothers and let's go."
"They can sleep in the room with their grandmother and I," said Ted as the boys shuffled out behind their mother. "Cody?"
"No," he said, standing as straight as he could. "I'm not sticking around for you. I'll stay and help look for Butch and Bev and Adam, but that's it." He turned and handed Judy the keys. "Get Gina and the kids out of here. I'll go tell Rita to get in and go with you."
Judy clutched her husband's hands with her own and nodded, fear blazing in her eyes. "Be safe, Cody."
"I will be." He faced his father then, who stood staring gape-mouthed at him. "We're done with this, dad. Your signs are out in Kelly and Butch's van." He approached the steps leading out of the RV, and felt a rush of dark glee as his father stutter-stepped down ahead of him. Cody spat to one side, then looked his father in the eyes. "It's like Gina just said- we should have listened to the priest."
Cody brushed past his father and pulled out his cell phone, dialing 411 so he could get the local precinct's number. In the front office, the overnight clerk let him use a pen to jot down the number, and he sat looking out the window until the RV left, unaware that at that moment, more punishment was being delivered upon his family.
**
They'd been playing gin-rummy and watching a Law and Order marathon when Ted heard Gina shouting outside. Barbara had been happy to while the time away with cards and small talk with the television going. Truth be told, when Ted had suggested they stop doing the kinky stuff, she felt relieved. It hadn't been all that much of a thrill for her in over a year. Her sex drive in general had diminished to nearly nothing.
As usual, though, she hadn't said anything or done anything about it. She was the wife- such wasn't her place, according to the church's teachings. She'd married Ted in the first place because of his father's teachings, her own family's adoration for the ways of the True Power Baptist Church. Ted was next in line, and what better way to serve the Lord than as the wife of His Chosen Spokesman?
So when he said he was going to see what all the noise was about, she raised no protest. But as he pulled the door shut behind him, Barbara Jenkins felt a dreadful chill fill the rented room, saw the lights grow dim.
Barbara turned her head slowly and looked toward the bathroom. There, sliding slowly out toward her, came a man-like shadow wearing a tattered black trench coat, twin crimson lights burning where its eyes should have been. Before she could cry out, it flew through the air at her, enveloping her in darkness. For a short while, that darkness and the scent of rotten eggs were all she knew.
All things, however, must pass, and soon she would see more than she would ever want to.
The Baptist God vs. The Devils of Amelia City...