by Ninie Hammon
Before he has time to recover from his surprise, the bell on the front door of the store dings, he hears running footsteps and a man bursts through the saloon doors into the room. He is huge, has a full, bushy beard and long hair that’s soaked. Following in his footsteps is a woman with tattoos covering her arms and legs and close behind her is a woman in a paint-splattered suit jacket and long skirt. An old Indian man hobbles into the room from a back entrance, followed by a bald man with some kind of red mark splattered on the top of his wet head and a fat Hispanic woman with a herd of small, rain-drenched children.
It takes less than a minute from the time he pulled the plug out of the wall for the room to fill with people—maybe two dozen of them. All of them look at him, surprised and confused, and he realizes he still has the ventilator cord in his hand. Instinctively, he drops it. Pedro takes two steps to the outlet, plugs the cord back into the socket and the screeching sound stops abruptly in mid-squall.
Into the silence that follows, Pedro says, “I warned you,” his tone surprisingly mild-mannered.
Yesheb’s eyes dart from one face to another around the room. It isn’t supposed to go down like this! He is in charge. How could this have happened? Oh, not just the people, the opposition. A powerful force has been set against him. He can almost see it, in fact, and the light makes him squint. He can certainly feel it, incredibly strong. The copper taste of fear fills his mouth and makes him instantly nauseous.
A woman’s voice purrs with derision in his ear. Are you some cowardly dog that tucks its tail between its legs and slinks away?
Surely you’re not … afraid. Are you? A man’s voice, speaking Arabic.
Then The Voice roars in his head with a volume ten times that of the siren.
You will stand!
Yesheb is far more frightened of The Voice than of any fate this world could deal him. The crowd’s shock is wearing off.
“What’d you set the alarm off for, Pedro?” the tattooed woman asks.
“Why’d—”
That moment of distraction gives Yesheb the edge he needs. He reaches into his shoulder holster and withdraws his Glock 22 and points it at Pedro. The crowd gasps. Pedro steps back in surprise.
Yesheb is in charge again.
“Give me that key—now!”
Still, the Hispanic man doesn’t respond with the fear Yesheb expects—needs. He merely looks around and asks, “You planning on shooting all of us?”
The fat Hispanic woman makes a strangled, squealing sound and crosses herself.
“There are only fifteen rounds in that Glock. You cannot kill everybody.”
“No, but I can kill …” he turns and shoves the barrel of the gun up against the temple of the little girl in the bed, “… her!”
Pedro’s face turns white and Yesheb knows he has him. “But perhaps you’d like for me to kill her. You poached her brain like an egg in the backseat of a car eight years ago. Maybe it would be better for everybody if I blew what little gray matter she has left all over that wall.”
“No! Please …” Pedro’s face is a twisted mask of fear and indecision.
“I will count to three. One. Two. Th—”
“Okay! Just don’t … okay. I will give it to you.” He sticks his hand into his pocket and withdraws a key ring and begins to thumb through the keys on it.
“Don’t bother trying to switch keys on me; I know they’re all labeled.” Pedro looks genuinely shaken. Yesheb relaxes. Yes, he is running the show now.
When Pedro locates the key, Yesheb tells him to place it on the foot of the bed and step back. Then Yesheb plucks it off the starched white sheet like a frog snatching a fly.
He flashes a beautiful smile, his most engaging.
THE MAN GRINNED, ugly and crooked, and Pedro measured the distance between them again. If the guy—the stalker—gave him the slightest opening, he’d lunge. But the intruder was careful to stay just out of Pedro’s reach. He was sharp. And absolutely devoid of humanity. No wonder Gabriella was terrified!
“You’re pathetic, you know that, don’t you,” the man said. He stepped away from the bed after he put the key into his pocket, but kept the gun carefully aimed at Angelina. “You think you’re such a hero.” Without turning away from Pedro, he spoke to the crowd. His voice dripped sarcasm. “You think he’s a hero, too, don’t you? The way he has stood up under such a load of pain in his life. The way he loves his children, sacrifices for them, takes such good care of them.” Yesheb made a humph sound in his throat. “You’re such fools.”
He turned slightly, didn’t move the pistol but caught Pedro’s gaze and locked on.
“I know you, the real you.” He literally hissed the words. “The you who holds his own daughter hostage, won’t let her leave home to get an education because you need her here.”
Pedro stared into eyes such a stark, arresting blue he could distinguish the color even from where he stood. It was the color of polar ice, frozen and lifeless.
The man nodded toward Angelina. “You took this little girl’s life and so you have given her yours in exchange. You’ve sacrificed everything for her—isn’t that right?” He lowered his voice in a mockery of the intimate way one friend addresses another. “Only it’s not for her at all. None of it’s about her or her future. She has no future and everybody knows it.”
He leaned forward and spit words at Pedro the way cowboys spit tobacco juice on the ground. “You do everything you can—pump air into her lungs and food into her stomach—focus your whole life and your kids’ lives on keeping Angelina alive so your great sacrifice will make you feel better. That’s not love, my stupid little friend, that’s guilt—the ultimate selfabsorption. All of this …” He gestured toward the hospital bed and medical paraphernalia. “… is about you, not Angelina—as much now as it was the day you were too busy, too caught up in what was going on in your world to notice that your baby was roasting like a Thanksgiving turkey less than fifty yards away.”
Pedro was so staggered by the man’s words, he could not move, could not breathe. And that was exactly what the guy intended. Like throwing a stun grenade into a crowd, the stalker used the shock he had produced to take three steps and grab the arm of the closest child—six-year-old Serena Sanchez, who was standing beside her wide-eyed mother. Julia Sanchez cried out and reached for Serena, but the man yelled at her to shut up and stand back and held the gun to the little girl’s temple. Julia clamped her hands over her mouth and didn’t move.
“I don’t want this kid. I have no reason to take her with me; she’d only get in my way. I’ll let her go when I get to my jeep if you all move aside and let me walk out of here. If you don’t … well, I’ll blow the brains out of a little girl who actually has some.”
The crowd parted like the Red Sea. The man shoved Serena ahead of him through the doors into the store. Pedro heard the jingle of the bell on the front door when it opened and when it closed. The sound released the crowd like the opening bell of a horse race and they all rushed into the store to look out the front windows.
Pedro did not move. It seemed that he stood motionless for a long time, but it was probably less than thirty seconds before he heard the commotion out front that freed his paralyzed legs. He got to the saloon doors as Serena burst through the front door of the store and into her mother’s arms.
Then there was pandemonium all around him. His neighbors surged back into his kitchen babbling. Anza rushed to Angelina, threw herself across the child and sobbed. Voices assaulted him, people wanting to know what had happened, who the man was, why—
Pedro ignored the questions and fumbled in his pocket for his cell phone, his hands shaking. He pulled it out and dialed 911. The voice of the dispatcher who answered sounded as rattled and frantic as he did.
“I want to report a …” What? What had it been? “… a man with a gun threatened a bunch of people in St. Elmo and he ees on his way up to St. Elmo’s Fire to—”
“Is this about the escaped convicts?�
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“What?”
“There was a prison break half an hour ago. Men with automatic weapons blew a hole in the perimeter fence—is that what you’re calling about?”
“No, but—”
“Sir, I’m sorry. I can only deal with life-and-death emergencies right now.”
“This is a life-and-death emergency!”
“I will take your name and phone number and somebody will get back to you as soon as possible.”
Pedro hung up. The police would not come to Gabriella’s aid in time to do her any good. A prison break. How convenient. Surely … He let the thought go, turned, pushed his way back through the crowd to the gun rack above the fireplace and grabbed the .30-06 hunting rifle. He snatched his rain jacket and hat off the hook by the swinging doors as he headed into the Mercantile. There was a box of shells for the rifle under the cash register.
THE STORM ABATED while Yesheb was in the store, but the sky is pregnant with more rain and threatens to give birth any minute.
Yesheb should be elated as he drives along Chalk Creek Canyon Road to the turnoff that will take him to the jeep trail up the mountainside to St. Elmo’s Fire. He has the key in his pocket! He is on his way.
But he isn’t elated. The voices have been berating him ever since he shoved the little girl back toward the store, leapt into the jeep and sped away.
Yesheb couldn’t even execute his own plan, they say. Things went terribly wrong. The shopkeeper is still alive. The man who helped Zara defy him, her friend, her confidant and maybe even her … lover escaped the retribution he deserved.
And there were witnesses! Oh, minions like that could be paid off; he could purchase their silence with pocket change. That wasn’t the point. They had seen, watched Yesheb come close to losing in a battle of wills.
Yesheb had not shown well. Not well at all.
While the other voices rail at him, The Voice remains silent. Yesheb knows why. The Voice understands. The Voice recognized the forces that stood against Yesheb in that place, the power the mustached fool didn’t even know he possessed. Yesheb should have displayed his own strength. He should have overpowered the Opposition, annihilated it.
Why hadn’t he?
Was he … afraid?
While the other voices attack him like a thousand screaming harpies, The Voice says nothing. That silence is deafening.
Yesheb endures the squalling in his head all the way up the road to the turn-off beside a complex of red stone buildings. It continues as he struggles to maneuver his way up a trail strewn with rocks, pitted by huge potholes and knobby with exposed tree roots. When he gets to the first switchback, the noise stops in mid-babble like somebody hit the mute button. Yesheb is instantly alone, abandoned. Trembling and demoralized, he struggles to pull it together for his assault on the cabin. His gentle assault. His “kind” invasion.
Then he lifts his eyes and actually looks at the switchback and gate. His stomach heaves. He had not expected anything like this! His men had warned him, of course, but he’d dismissed their concerns.
Yesheb sets the emergency brake on the idling vehicle and steps down out of it, scrambles up the wet trail to the gate, unlocks it and shoves it open. He sinks down on the edge of the concrete gate footer for a few moments looking at the almost vertical hairpin turn carved out of the rock. How can he possibly—
Then he hears the loud rumble of an engine. Someone is coming up the trail behind him!
He jumps up, loses his footing on the slippery rocks and slides back down to the trail below. Scrambling to his feet, he leaps into the jeep, fumbles to disengage the emergency brake, then panics and slams the accelerator all the way to the floorboard. The tires spin and catch and the jeep leaps forward into the switchback.
His fear saves him. He’d never have taken the curve that fast—and he needed the speed to make the turn. He roars through the switchback, bounces heavily over a rock at the top of the trail and skids to a stop. For a moment, he sits panting, then jumps out of the jeep and locks the gate behind him. As he charges up the rutted trail to face more switchbacks—aerial photographs showed seven of them—he clings to the knowledge that he only has to make it up the trail to the cabin. He won’t have to come back down. He will be taking a much more comfortable mode of transportation when he whisks his bride off the mountaintop and away into their future.
The thought of his beloved Zara both calms him and pumps adrenaline into his veins. He feels his resolve return. He will win. He will prevail. Yesheb Al Tobbanoft is The Beast of Babylon. It is a destiny that was laid out for him the moment he first displayed his power. The day he devoured his twin brother in their mother’s womb, he began the journey that will end in victory on this mountaintop today!
PEDRO PULLED TO a stop short of the first switchback and banged his fists on his steering wheel in frustration. The gate was locked. Of course, there had only been the slightest possibility that it would not be, that the man—Pedro did not even know his name!—who had taken the key was so arrogant he did not believe anybody would follow him. Or knew the police would be too occupied with the prison break to respond, which opened up another whole can of worms Pedro was not prepared to fish with right now.
The night of Anza’s birthday party Gabriella had asked him if he believed in evil.
“The kind of man who delights in hurting other people—is he crazy or evil?” she had asked.
He had responded, “Both!”
Certainly the look in that man’s eyes was the very definition of madness, but was that all? Or was there something bigger than insanity driving him? The stalker had actually felt … cold. Sure, the man had been soaked to the skin, but Pedro would have sworn he radiated a chill into the air around him that had nothing to do with being wet.
And the things he knew. Not just information but Pedro’s soul, what he wrestled with in the darkest ditch of the night when no one was there to see. Almost like—
Pedro shook it off. It did not really matter at this point whether the man was a who or a what … a distinction without a difference. What did matter was that he was roaring up the mountain right this minute to kidnap Gabriella! The terror that thought struck in Pedro’s heart knocked down the fortifications denial had so carefully erected and scattered the last vestiges of protest and doubt like a flock of startled chickens. His feelings for Gabriella were real and deep and he was nauseous at the thought of what that man would do to her.
And Gabriella was not the only one whose life was in danger. The madman needed “innocent blood” to offer as a sacrifice on their nuptial altar. Pedro had read the book! And the innocent blood on that mountain was Ty’s.
He switched off the ignition, jumped out of the jeep, reached back in, grabbed the rifle off the backseat floorboard and emptied the box of shells into his pocket. He would have to make his way up the mountain to St. Elmo’s Fire on foot and he took off running—strained to outdistance his fear that whatever horror the stalker intended to inflict on Gabriella and her family would be over before he could get there to protect them.
* * * *
Gabriella sat propped up with pillows on her bed with her computer on her lap. It was an exercise in futility and she knew it. How could she possibly write when her mind was fuzzy from lack of sleep, her gut was tied in a knot and her hands were trembling?
Maybe if I put my fingers on the keyboard they’ll hop around and write without me.
Couldn’t be a whole lot worse than the tortured verse she had composed with her mind fully engaged. But she was coming along; bit by bit it was coming back to her.
She sighed, then reached out her hand to the .38 on the bedside table. Her security blanket. And she’d use it, too, she told herself fiercely. If that maniac came anywhere near her, she’d … She didn’t pick the gun up, merely touched it, felt the gun barrel as cold as a stone.
Except not all stones were cold. She looked up at the geode sparking on the dresser on the other side of the room. That stone had been warm.
Even though it had been lying in the shade with all the other rocks, it had been—
The memory downloaded into her mind like a file off the internet. Between one heartbeat and the next, she knew.
Gabriella jumped up off the bed and raced down the stairs to the big fireplace that covered the wall between the family room and the kitchen. She scooted aside the pile of kindling and inspected a spot where the bottom of the hearth connected to the bricks going up the wall. She reached out and pushed on a brick on the bottom, wiggled it back and forth like a little kid’s tooth to loosen it. Then she tugged on it and it slid out into her hand with a grating sound, revealing a small cavity behind it. Gabriella reached into the opening and her fingers felt something round and hard. She drew it out of the hole into the light and stared at it in wonder. Though the crystals were dirty, it was still incredibly beautiful—bleeg. Just like the other half of the geode on her dresser upstairs.
Getting slowly up off her knees, Gabriella went into the kitchen and turned on the water in the sink. When the accumulated dust of years inside the hearth was washed away, the crystals in the geode sparkled. All the ones in this half of the rock were the same size and shape, about as big around as the end of her little finger and multicolored like the prism of colors in the other half. They made a solid carpet of crystal that would have formed a canopy over the large, clear, center crystal before the rock was broken in half. No, not a canopy. A sky. The colored crystals were arranged in rows—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. A rainbow.
TY SAT IN the deck chair on the balcony outside his room with P.D. stretched out on the damp wood decking beside him. The rain had stopped—for now—but he could hear thunder growl higher up on the mountain. He took his glasses off and cleaned them on his shirt—the mist kept fogging them up.
The lightning that sparkled in the clouds above Antero looked like Christmas lights blinking in a gray cotton ball. Ty was watching, waiting to see a bolt actually strike the peak. He shouldn’t have to wait long. He’d already seen two strike the mountain near the wash above the tree line. But he was waiting for a single bolt to snake down from the clouds to the highest tip of rock—so he could draw a picture of it while the image was still fresh in his mind.
