Follow the Ashes: Book 1 of the Executioner Trilogy

by Kindra Sowder

  Lilith looked from him down at me, a smile twisting her features to where all you could see was the evil slithering out of her every pore. It came to meet me down on the hard and unforgiving ground. Her eye teeth were gleaming in the light. I felt so insignificant, almost like she was a giant and I was one lonely ant that she was threatening to squish with her thumb. I was so weak and pitiful she could have snapped me in half with little effort, but I knew this fresh horror she was about to unveil wasn’t going to be inflicted upon me. She was in yet another white gown but this one had small crimson accents that stood out against the pure white of the rest of it. I was right in my earlier assumption. After all of this I would really come to hate that color.

  “Everyone you touch is soon after greeted by death, Executioner. You should have thought about that before refusing my proposal.” She then looked at Gordon and the smile faded, turning into a look that I would never forget as long as I lived. It would continue to haunt me, even in death. The look was hatred and fury, and I knew in that instant what this would mean for him. There was nothing I could do to stop it no matter how much I wanted to be able to. In that moment I knew there would be nothing left for us but death and destruction.

  All I could mutter was a simple and feeble apology to him hoping he would understand that there was truly nothing I could do to save him this time. It was almost like I had to convince myself of that fact and he already knew. There was no conceivable way I was going to be able to save him this time. It took all I had to be able to hold my head up and stare Lilith in the eyes, vowing vengeance, and I was filled with so much sorrow and rage it was devastating.

  No matter how hard I tried there was nothing else I could do but watch helplessly as Lilith reached her hand into his gut. She twisted and pulled as Gordon screamed in agony, and it was like his pain was my own. My own belly began to convulse and send ripples of pain through my entire body, threatening to tear me apart from the inside out. Wet ripping sounds filled the air and were almost muffled by his cries as she dug her fingers deeper and deeper inside of him. She was going to make sure there were no vital organs left. Sounds of horror and anguish poured out of me of their own volition until she dropped him onto the ground. Moans filled with pain escaped his lips. Blood poured from his mouth and dribbled down his chin.

  Lilith’s laughs pierced the air. As fast as she had appeared, she was gone. It was like she hadn’t been there at all. Only Gordon’s mangled body and my despair remained. I struggled to close the last few inches between us and thankfully he was still breathing when I was able to make it to him. It felt like hours instead of minutes. His breaths were labored and when I could finally see the mangled mess that was his stomach I had to cover my mouth to keep from screaming out. Bloody tears did manage to escape from my eyes and a few landed on what remained of his white shirt, which wasn’t much more than a few pieces of shredded cotton. I couldn’t keep myself from sobbing as I listened to his strenuous breathing and held onto his hand as tightly as I could. I was begging him to hold onto life until I could find a way to bring him back from the brink of death.

  He took a deep breath in and then let it out in a rush, signaling that he was gone and he wouldn’t be returning. Sadness overtook me and sobs escaped my body before I could stop them. I laid my head on the cold floor that was now slick with sweat and blood. His blood. The life force had completely drained from his body, leaving it a pale shell with no more love left in it. No life left to fill every crevice. His hand was still clutched tightly in mine, but the man I loved was gone.

  As I laid there and the blood that made up my tears continued to flow and pool on the floor beneath my cheek, a piercing wail shot through the air.

  Chapter 24:Gone

  Sirens. All I could hear were the blaring sirens as they got closer and closer to the house. Apparently someone close by had heard our struggle and called the police. As I wondered how we could explain this without looking crazy, my heart was breaking more and more with every bloody tear that made its path down my cheek.

  My hair was plastered to my face with sweat and chills racked through me as sobs continued to escape from my now raw throat and lungs. I tried to fight the shivers ravaging my body, but it was hopeless. My teeth began to chatter of their own volition. I barely even noticed the sound of the front door being kicked in and the wood splintering as it fell to the ground with such finality that it all seemed too real. He was gone, and I could no longer save him. That was it.

  I was starting to think there was no hope for me yet seeing as I had a mystical illness there was no way any human doctor or western medicine could cure. Now Gordon was dead. There was nothing left for me. Even though I had seen it with my own eyes I still couldn’t completely believe it had actually happened. How did we get here? How did I become a broken shell lying on the floor next to the broken and bloody body of the man she loved and couldn’t even put up a fight to save him? All of the energy was gone from my body and I had become so tired in my efforts to stay awake while my life was fading away in small increments that all I wanted to do was give up right then and there. All I wanted to do was close my eyes and let go. I wanted to drown in my sorrows, and just let it all end. I wanted to become just another body in another coffin in a hole in the earth for the worms to feed on.

  There was a fear in me too that I couldn’t explain. Was it the fear of death and what it had in store for me, or was it a fear that everyone around me would come to perish and I would be the only one left standing in the end? Left to fight this battle for eternity alone. I sure hoped not. If that was what fate had in store for me I didn’t want it. Sorry, fate. That was just how I felt.

  Then people were in the house. Two or three people. Three. Two male, and one female. I could feel their energies as they made their way through our home, looking to see if anyone was inside and alive. Their radios were beeping every so often as a transmission ended. Would they understand? Would they leave me in peace to just let me lay there and die if I had asked them to? I wanted that so badly at this point. If only I could take his place, and what about poor Beth? Did she make it through the terror? Then I heard it. The best sentence one could ever hope to hear when faced with a situation like this.

  “We’ve got a live one in here!” a man yelled at the top of his lungs. He had found Beth and she was still alive. A joyful sorrow filled me to the brim and tears began to flow once again. Sobs took me over just one more time. With what little energy I had left I let my mind reach out to her, and I could hear her heart beating in her chest behind her ribs. It was slow and quiet, but she wasn’t fading. She was just badly injured to the point of unconsciousness which caused her heart beat to slower.

  As far as I could tell, she would be just fine. Just a little on the sore side for a while, which wasn’t how I saw this ending at all, especially not for me and definitely not for Gordon. I was pretty sure at the start of it all we would all end up dead. I would’ve rather I had died than Gordon, but I was certain I was going to be meeting him very soon. The world was becoming one huge monster, and there seemed to be no way for me to stop it no matter how hard I fought and bled and I would die trying.

  I still felt Gordon’s hand in mine and I knew all hope was gone. He was gone, and he was my light in the darkness and Lilith had taken that away from me. He was going to lead me out of the darkness, but now that was a distant dream. That was unforgiveable, and Lilith would pay for what she had done. I wasn’t sure how, but she would.

  Heavy footfalls began to sound, coming in our direction. My eyes were closed so all I could see was the darkness, and it had beaten me to the point of giving up. All I wanted was for someone to lie to me and tell me he was alive and it was all just a dream. A horrible, gory dream that I would soon wake up from. I would see him happy and smiling when I opened my eyes. But all I saw when I opened them was a blurry figure of a man coming towards me at a hurried pace, large bag in his gloved hand. He wore black slacks and a white button up shirt with patches designating h
im as EMS. I didn’t want someone to be here to save me. Not when I had failed in saving someone so dear to me. All I wanted was for him to let me fade away until I was alone with the darkness. Gordon’s eyes, which had reminded me of the same darkness, would never sparkle again. They would never see my love for him again.

  I didn’t want to live this life anymore. Not without him. There was no way that life was going to be the same ever again without his loving presence, and with the way things were looking I wasn’t going to make it past the next few days anyway. I’d be lucky to make it the next few hours or even minutes. This was okay by me. Things would no longer be the same after all of this. No way, no how.

  The man towering over me tenderly touched the side of my throat, feeling for a pulse that I knew was barely there. He found it with gloved hands which told me he was very good at his job. With a voice that sounded so much like Gordon’s he yelled, “We have two more in here! One is dead!”

  Dead. That was definitely what he was and I would soon meet him wherever people went when they left this earth. The man’s hand felt so warm through the nitrile gloves. Gordon’s had once held this same kind of heat, but were now so frigid and so cold that even the heat from my own body couldn’t bring him back. Out of all the gifts I had been blessed with I couldn’t bring him back if I really wanted to. I wasn’t given the gift to bring back the dead no matter how much I wished I had been. I could create fire from almost nothing and I had such immense strength I could bench press a tree, but I couldn’t bring him back to life.

  I could feel myself making weak attempts to keep the man from pushing a needle for an IV into my veins, but despite those attempts the needle slid home right into the network of veins in the bend of my elbow. It stung as it pierced my skin and it spread throughout my body as he hooked the bag up to some fluids which began to flow at a slow pace through the tube and into my body. As soon as the fluid hit my veins I wished there was a way I could force it back out of them. I didn’t want to live.

  The liquid felt cold as it made its way down the path of veins and arteries inside of me. The chills I had been feeling before were amplified a thousand times as it coursed through me, paving its way into every cell of my body. I could feel it replenishing me. I wanted to rip the needle right out of my arm, but I was too weak to get my arm barely off of the floor to do just that. I could feel each and every molecule of saline that was being injected into me marching right on through, trying so hard to revitalize my cells despite the barrier this bug had created to keep anything that was there to save my life from entering them.

  By some miracle, that overwhelming thirst I had been feeling since I fell ill was starting to inch away little by little. As the man cut my shirt open to stick those little adhesive pads on my chest for the machine that would let them know how close to death I was, I couldn’t help but notice that his eyes were a deep amber color. Almost like the color of honey. His face had a five o’clock shadow, and he wore his hair almost exactly like Gordon had. It was a little shorter than his, but very close. He had the same muscular build that made you think of a god, but I guess you had to be built well to do this job with all of the heavy lifting.

  I suddenly felt so alone, even though I knew Beth was still alive and was going to pull through without any problems. I wasn’t so sure about me, though. A part of me had known from the beginning that this wouldn’t end well for me. This was now so painfully obvious by the way the man who was trying to keep me alive released my hand from Gordon’s lifeless one.

  I wanted so badly to reach back out and take his hand back into my own, but I was way too weak to do it. My eyes were barely open and it took all the energy I had to keep them that way. The man leaned slowly down to look me in the eyes and I could smell his cologne.

  “My name is Chase Renaud, and I’m going to take care of you until we can get you to the hospital, okay? Can you hear me?” I groaned a response which was all I could do at the moment. It was too hard to speak and my throat was so raw from the outpouring of emotion as I had laid there waiting for death to wrap its arms around me and take me away. Everything went black as night as I found a renewed hope in the man with the honey colored eyes.

  The beeping coming from the small machine was way too loud for my ear drums. They felt like they were about to erupt from the pressure of the sounds coming from it. Once I opened my eyes, I was greeted by the subtle light in the ambulance and the sirens as we sped our way to the hospital and to a possible way to save me. I doubted they could, but it was worth a try, right? The fluids had seemed to be helping with my intense thirst but nothing seemed to be able to take away the fever and the ache. I kept feeling like a monster headache would somehow end me.

  Everything seemed so shaky, like someone shooting a film while running around with a video camera. There was an aura around everything that it made it hard to focus on any one thing. The bright rings of color around everything were disorienting. Chase was sitting next to me, blue gloved hand on my arm, watching the vitals on the machine. They were so slow even I had to admit that I was very close to death’s door and would be knocking on it very soon. There was no way I would make it to live into next week. No way physically possible. If I did, it would be a miracle.

  The ride, even though the fastest ride I had ever taken anywhere, felt like it took an eternity. It was really mere minutes until I was crashing through the doors to the emergency room. Everything seemed to be happening in a rush of blurry images. I hadn’t even noticed when they had stuck an oxygen mask onto my face to help me breathe better.

  Before that mask I felt like I had been suffocating but now I could breathe just fine. It wasn’t so labored my chest had to strain to move up and down in that familiar rhythm. A doctor leaned over me with a mask over his mouth and nose, a chart in hand. I knew there was no way I was going to be leaving this hospital alive. Modern medicine wasn’t going to be enough to cure me of what ailed me no matter how much I wished for it. I just knew there wasn’t a single medication in the world that would cure me of Lilith’s disease.

  Chapter 25: Trapped

  I awoke again and I was lying in a hospital bed with a tube coming out of my arm and one right under my nose delivering oxygen to my nearly deprived brain and cells. I almost felt refreshed, but I was still in a lot of pain. My head still felt like it could explode at any moment. That pain had spread to my arms and legs and down to my toes and my fingers, so just wiggling them was pure agony. I was in a haze from all of the pain medications they had injected me with in the emergency room before being wheeled up four floors to this room. Everything was a huge blur. Not just my memory. Everything around me was fuzzy and I couldn’t focus on any of it. Not even if I squinted my eyes.

  Then everything kept creeping back into my memory and all I wanted to do was scream and sob. All of the blood and destruction and the fear and the sadness. So much of it had come into our lives and it had torn us apart. Literally. Beth, as far as I knew, was only a few doors away hooked up to the same machines as I was. She was unconscious with a broken collarbone, and was being fed blood through the IV just like any pain medications in case she came to.

  I looked to my right and saw the machine the IV ran through that was injecting fluids and blood into my right arm. I apparently had a very low red blood cell count. That was what I had heard the doctor say, anyway. The revelation didn’t surprise me at all. I had vomited pure blood earlier that day as well as pouring tears of blood for only knew how long I was lying there trying to hold onto Gordon with all I had. I felt like a walking biohazard that would spread a plague of blood and death through this hospital, and then through to the rest of the world. I then saw a chair at my bed side, a man sitting in it, his chin resting on his chest as if he was asleep and there was no waking him. I recognized this man from somewhere, but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure where from. Then it all came flooding back in a rush.

  The man who came into my bedroom, horrified by the sight of Gordon’s mutilated body on the floor
and me beside him, hand in hand, barely clinging to life. He had brought me back from the edge with his voice and with the lifesaving tools he carried with him in a black duffel bag designated for medical supplies.

  A flash of Gordon struggling to hold onto life entered my mind and I couldn’t shut it out. His eyes, which had once held so much light in them, were beginning to look dull and lifeless as he faded away. All I could do was lie there and let it happen. But what could I do while I was dying myself? There was absolutely nothing I could do but be there and be what he saw in his last moments: a memory to take into death with him as everything that was what made him so special slipped away.

  This man sleeping at my bedside reminded me somewhat of him, except for those honey colored eyes that I had never seen on anyone before. Not anyone who was human anyway, but this man, from what I could tell, was all human. Nothing evil in him at all. Just a kind heart and a will to save the lives of any person he encountered who needed saving. Funny how I ended up being the person he would come to save, just to lose because of something no one could possibly save me from. No one but Lilith could lift it from me, and there was no way she would choose to let me live when I had denied her.

  While I was off in thought I hadn’t even noticed that the man in the chair had woken up until I heard him move and he said, “Good morning.”

  His name, what was it? Something that started with a “C.” I remembered that much, but I couldn’t remember it for the life of me. I also had no idea why he was sitting beside my bed like he knew me and wanted to see me get better. I was half expecting to see a teddy bear holding a heart that said, “Get well soon,” in white cursive letters.