Crucified: The Rise of an Urban Legend (Swann Series Book 9)

by Ryan Schow

  Oh how I’d love to tear this man’s tongue clean from his mouth! Just rip it loose and make him look at it before he falls down dead before these swine!

  “No!” roars the voice in my head.

  Crippled by the force of the word, my hands relax and I slowly move back. Looking upon these fools with the harshest of judgment and a howl of pain in the back of my throat, I see that this act of defiant love by Mary touches more than a few of them.

  Standing paralyzed before this, my heart trembling, the world blurred at the edges with tears that will not be restrained, I now understand how one can stand in the midst of so much hate and injustice and still move forward.

  A few people come forward from the crowd and oblige Mary to move, to let the procession through. Jesus’s eyes lift off her, settle on the road ahead. The strain of the cross on his back is becoming too much.

  She stands on her own, not a finger laid upon her, and is whisked off by John. She returns to the gateway, reaching for a green veined stone to hold her body as it gives out on her one last time. She sinks to her knees, paralyzed with a grief I can’t even touch for fear of always carrying pieces of it with me.

  Before I leave, I send a flood of love into the woman, hoping it will offer her heart a moment’s reprieve. It is all I can do. Fortunately I am not stopped by the booming, otherworldly voice.

  Apparently love will not be turned away as my earlier reprisals have been.

  The executioners jab their sharp lances into Jesus, getting him moving. The crowd stirs, their joy a lake of contemptuous darkness that leaves me feeling helpless before all of this…madness.

  I’ve never spoken to God before, except to curse Him for what He has let happen to me throughout my life, but now I want that open channel. As I make my way ahead of the procession (because I don’t trust myself to walk with them without slowly ending each and every one of their lives), I ask God to let me help, to let me at least temper Jesus’s load.

  Right then Jesus stumbles, going to a knee. The whips and lances fail to raise him for his body is weary, too weak to stand. The soldiers point to a man who reluctantly gets underneath the cross and lifts it off Jesus’s back. The broken man tries to stand, but is stopped as a rope is curled and fastened around his neck. Another section of rope binds his wrists. While the cross is managed by another man, Jesus is violently dragged forward, stumbling and falling on knees and his side until he can somehow stagger to his feet and keep up.

  All of this is happening and I’m cursing God for being complicit in this. Jesus’s load is lightened though, so perhaps He listened to me. I curse Him nevertheless, slinging judgment and anger His way.

  At the gates of the city Jesus is allowed a moment of absolution, a brief reprieve. Taking that time, he turns to the woman who have followed him so loyally, enduring the abusive chants, the barrage of violence heaped up on him, and in his language he says, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ For if they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”

  I will remember these words well into the future as I turn them over in my mind gleaning from them a thousand truths.

  For now, I watch in sorrow, filling Jesus with my love, pressing upon him my gratitude for everything he is doing for us now, and for how it will impact the masses for thousands of years to come.

  I know what happens next. Rather I have a crude idea of what is to come. History under the broad brush paints a certain picture, but the minor details and the timing of certain events have been slightly jumbled due to limited reporting and speculation. Much of what has been written about Jesus’s walk of sorrow isn’t one hundred percent accurate, which I expected because history that happened two thousand years ago is never accurate to the detail. I expect Jesus to fall a third and final time before making it to Calvary on will power alone. When this happens I am in Jesus’s head, whispering to him a hundred grateful things.

  I’m telling him that his sacrifice will unburden the restless souls of millions in the two thousand years to come. I tell him I am no angel, but that today I will be his angel. I tell him that if he cannot handle it—if he doubts the value of this quest—to at least know that I am here with him, and that I represent billions of people he will never know in his life.

  At the top of the hill, as the trunk of the cross is laid down and he is laid upon it, I stand close enough to look into his eyes, whispering my love for him. He turns and finds me, almost like he knows. I blink back the tears, hold his soul swallowing gaze and into his mind, I say, “Yes, I am here.”

  The first spike is driven into him and it’s pure, unadulterated violence upon my soul. This is a pain so sharp and crippling I stagger backwards, holding my arm, struck with the same force as him. My body is gouged open up in the same place as his, but my wounds close quickly as I pull my arm toward my body.

  A voice, low and hypnotic, whispers into my mind, “These are his wounds, his pain. He bears this burden willingly, little one.”

  The next spike is driven into him and I share this pain too, letting my body open once more—the same as Jesus’s body. I yelp and stagger backwards, falling to a knee. I am not alone. The women of Jerusalem are dying their separate, public deaths as well.

  The voice again: “This is not your pain.”

  When they cross his feet and drive a final spike through them, I deny the pain in my body. Jesus is tempering the pain himself, grinding down on something I cannot imagine—surrender, it would seem, or perhaps a pain that drags at him, pulling at him, breaking him to the core.

  Moving back, unable to look anymore because an anger is welling inside of me like I’ve never known before, I feel the upsurge of the emotions of everyone present. My thoughts and emotions, however, begin to crystalize into something dangerous. I am the voice against injustice, and this is unjust! I am the voice against martyrdom and this is both hateful and wrong!

  As they stand Jesus on the cross (next to the crosses of the two thieves), this darkness in me gathers so much strength it awakens The Operator. The beast is now screaming and shaking his cage like he just needs to see what’s to come. There is a rising insanity inside me that calls out to him, beckons him, fills him with a sort of frenzied delight.

  It’s noon when they stand the cross up, but the sun suddenly dims with my rage. As I see Jesus now raised up before the Romans, my eyes drown with an impossible darkness. The hate in me suddenly blows out into the world like a billion demons spilling forth with their black, flapping wings.

  Tears of blood leak from my eyes and nose; even my fingernails seep with red. The expulsion exhausts me though, and when I open my eyes, the world has fallen to shade, a long shadow cast so dark over the lands of Calgary that I look to the sun thinking there must be a full eclipse. But there is no eclipse.

  Is this me?

  Am I the darkness cast upon these lands?

  There is nothing stirring inside of me, though. Not all the deep seeded fury that spun itself around my soul so tightly that I’ve been led to believe that I am darkness incarnate. What a lie I’ve let myself believe! I am not evil, for this darkness inside has finally left me.

  Sitting back on my heels, breathing a sigh of relief for this burden released, I let myself cry not for what is being lost in this crucifixion, but for what is being gained. My sorrow is tempered though as my eyes hone in on Jesus. And suddenly, the dim light of a sun struggling to pierce this veil of darkness slides behind a body standing before me.

  The shadow cast upon me snares my attention. I walk my eyes up the legs and waist of this man before me. When I get to his chin, his nose and then his eyes, all I say is, “Hello f*ckface,” because I realize the magnitude of the mistake I’ve just made.

 
Chapter Twenty-Six

  Aloysius pulls me into a shadow of this world, one where I can see the crucifixion and the people here, but I am displaced from it. Almost like my spirit has been pulled from my body and brought into a separate construct.

  “Look at you, all broken up for a guy you didn’t know who walked to his own death.”

  “You wouldn’t understand the reasons for it,” I say, standing up before him. “I would think a blood sucking maggot like you would prefer to stand in the crowd and cheer for his demise rather than talk to someone like me.”

  “A guy who walks to his own death does nothing to impress me,” he replies. “Besides, I didn’t come here for him. I came here for you.”

  And with that, his attack on me comes so swiftly and with such force, that the wind is literally knocked out of me.

  It barely even registers that I’ve been hit.

  By the time I flop down on the ground, I’m wondering what just happened. But as I’m wondering that, I’m being hauled up by the throat and launched into the closest cross where one of the thieves hangs. My hip crashes into the wood and I’m spun around and slammed into a small rock wall.

  Before I can even think to recover, Aloysius lifts me up by my hair, pulls me face to face with him.

  “You threw me into traffic,” he hisses.

  Despite the monumental pain I’m feeling, I start laughing because I know this, above everything else, pisses him off the most.

  He grabs me by the throat, let’s go of my hair.

  I almost don’t care that Aloysius is here, or that he’s holding me up to the point where I feel myself gasping, choking. A quick glance over his shoulder shows me the mourners for Jesus and how they are totally unaffected by what is happening here. They aren’t looking at us.

  How is this happening? I find myself wondering. They’re not even seeing us!

  With my mind, I retaliate, squeezing his throat closed. His eyes bulge with both surprise and pressure.

  “Feels good, right?” I gurgle, hoarse, my airway all but shut.

  Two ragged ivory-colored bones punch out of his knuckles, ribbons of blood spreading over the ridges. My eyes and my curiosity are drawn to them, but in that moment, moving so fast he’s a blur, he drives these two bones into my neck, startling me, catching me completely off guard.

  With these same bones, he slices open his mouth at the edges.

  Before he can open this gaping maw and show me all his teeth, I slam him with an energy wave so abrupt and so fueled by rage he’s pitched sideways off of me. I hit the ground hard. For a second, I try to catch a breath. Instinctually, my hand goes to my punctured neck where I’m losing blood fast.

  Before I look up, before I can even get that first big breath, he’s got that split second advantage over me.

  A clawed hand jams into the soft flesh beneath my floating rib, razor sharp fingers digging in me. The fingers are needy and rude, wiggling and scraping and cramming itself up inside me.

  The pain hits my eyes as I cough out a sharp gasp. Looking up, however, I find his eyes and I am stilled.

  In those eyes, there is a peacefulness that seems to temper all the madness. When that grotesque mouth of his opens into a gigantic, razor toothed hole, I am so enthralled by the beauty and tranquility of his gaze that I fail to feel even an ounce of fear.

  His face latches onto my neck and I feel an immense sucking that honestly feels like the best feeling ever. The fight leaves me like it was never there in the first place.

  I let him have me. I want him to have me.

  The euphoria washing over me right now is sexual, spiritual, otherworldly. My hands slide up his arms, my fingers slipping into his hair; my foot touches his thigh, inches up to his privates, rubbing over his groin gently, suggestively.

  I am going to die here at Jesus’s crucifixion and honestly, I’m ready for it. I want it. This way is the best way—no pain, no struggle; death in the midst of a loin-stirring rapture too intense for words.

  In that moment, the moment of my greatest surrender, a hand grabs Aloysius by the back of his neck and rips him off me, throwing his big body backwards with such animalistic force he hits the ground and skips sideways over the sloping side of the hill.

  Standing before me, looking similar to me (but a little taller and way more badass), is a girl whom I know right away to be Amanda—my multiverse equivalent.

  She helps me up and honestly, I’m a bit star struck. There’s a steely look in her eyes I wish I had.

  Why did I get rid of the darkness in me so soon? Did Aloysius know this? Is that why he attacked me?

  Behind Amanda is a fiery redhead, a gorgeous girl who looks almost exactly like Georgia. I briefly graze her mind, knowing she’s not my Georgia. This multiverse Georgia is holding the hand of a small girl with black hair hanging over one eye. A multiverse Alice. The half-pint demon child stands there like she’s waiting for a toy, or a PB&J with the crusts cut off. Between the ginger and the firestarter, the two of them could scorch this earth bare.

  “Why are you here?” I ask.

  “You know why.”

  “I feel loopy,” I hear myself say. At this point, I don’t know how this half-existence works. The mourners cannot see us. We are standing before them, yet we are invisible to them. Looking at Amanda, who has amethyst eyes and better skin, I ask, “What is this place?”

  “The in-between. A thin construct we have in our world to handle our affairs out of the public eye. Think of it as the blurred edge of reality where people like you and I can do the most damage without being seen.”

  “Looks like this version of you is a giant pussy,” Alice says.

  WTF?

  I need healing.

  “Amanda,” the redhead says, a warning. Glancing over at her, she’s seeing what we’re not.

  Aloysius is stalking up the side of the rocky, sloping hill with his hands at his sides and the most sinister rage in his eyes, eyes now shot through with black from corner to corner. He’s shaking his arms, stamping his feet. With every jarring movement, his bones look like they’re breaking, lengthening and remaking themselves. Right before our eyes, as he stalks us down, he gets taller, bigger, more…hard looking. His skin is changing its color and texture, growing plate-like.

  Alice turns and becomes a human flamethrower, washing this nightmare down with fire. He moves through it unabated, his body now more than seven and a half feet tall. Just then, Amanda puts her hand on my chest and hits me with a blast of energy so powerful my mouth opens in a startled huff that never makes it anywhere because she’s that ferocious.

  When she lets go, I feel supercharged.

  Whoa.

  The redhead shakes her hands and two fiery whips spring forth. Holy shit! She races toward the Aloysius thing and begins whipping this fire at him, striking his face, his arms, the front of his chest. Alice lets off the fire, takes a deep breath, looks at the blackened vampire-hybrid as he reaches nearly eight feet tall. I hit him with the psychic punch of all punches—a MOAB (mother of all bombs).

  The impact catches him right in the baby-maker; he buckles fast but recovers faster. Okay, I’m officially scared. They haven’t seen the blur. They haven’t seen how fast he can move.

  Sensei would tell me to buck up and dig in. He’d say, “If you’re going to die, take as many of them down with you as you can.”

  There is just one.

  He must die.

  My mind becomes a blade, splitting his skin open inside his thighs, at his kidneys, across the carotid artery. Amanda slams him with a burst of power as well. The attack both knocks him backwards and shakes the char off him. His skin is mottled grey, his eyes like black fire. His hands are claws a foot long and razor sharp, his mouth gnashing with indignation.

  The blur takes us all by surprise, causing both fire starters to fall, and Amanda’s throat to gash wide open.

  Blood geysers out of her throat as she spins around and staggers sideways.

  I catch him befor
e he hits me, wrap him in invisible chains and levitate him into the air. He’s a hissing, spitting beast, thrashing in the air above me. I call the darkness of the sky back into my body, wake The Operator and drag him out of his cage, sitting him into the driver’s seat beside me.

  Amanda is coming around, but right now there is a blistering heat that has just gone nuclear inside me (The Operator) and I’m slamming Aloysius’s levitated body into the ground. He squirms beneath my might but I’m a bomb going off inside him.

  I’m motherfreaking Hiroshima on steroids.

  Then Amanda is with me shoving violence and hysteria inside him. We’re swirling this energy in opposite directions while inside my head The Operator is going berserk with delight.

  The Alice equivalent stumbles forward, her stomach slashed open and bleeding, but her little hand fires out and she shoves molten lava into his insides. The beast’s ripped-open mouth is screaming, those mammoth claws ripping and tearing at his chest and abdominals trying to release this blistering hot fire.

  The ginger, who had fallen, is now turning over, her face wrought with agony. She unfurls her fingers and Aloysius’s body erupts into flames.

  This time he cannot shed our fire for it is burning beneath his skin, scorching the armor from underneath. When he finally lets go and gives himself over to the flames, the four of us draw back our power.

  Amanda hurries over to the redhead while I tend to mini-G (mini-Georgia, a.k.a., Firestarter Jr.). Her eyes are black, but waning, her hand over her stomach, which is red and wet. I close my eyes, lay my hand over her injury and feel her flesh with my mind. She moans a bit, the sounds of a child rather than the howls of a psychotic murderer.

  I envision her skin coming together. The edges reach for each other, the rush of new blood coming with all of its healing properties. I speed the process, bringing forth an abundance of her white blood cells. The netting starts, the blood thickening and clotting. I brush off the scabs, keeping the fresh skin beneath, drawing together each and every layer until my body is sweating and weak. I take my hand off her, let out a long held breath and sit back. Alice just looks at me like I’m the black unicorn no one has ever heard of before.