Apocalypse Crucible

by Mel Odom

  He kept his attention focused on the trail leading out of the cemetery.

  Marbury was miles away. He knew he’d never make it, but he had no choice except to try. There was nowhere else to run.

  Before he had covered fifty yards, a hand closed over Delroy’s shoulder and yanked him around. He tried to bring the shovel up but couldn’t move fast enough. The thing’s hand exploded into his face, slapping him so hard that he thought his neck was broken. Overcome by exhaustion after pushing himself so hard and so long, Delroy didn’t have much to give. He lost the shovel and dropped to one knee.

  “You’re not getting away that easily,” the creature said, coming for him. “Me and you, we’ve got some excavating to do.”

  Delroy pushed himself up from the ground. He’d fought the thing before in Washington. He knew from experience that it was more powerful and quicker than he was. But he couldn’t find it in himself to just lie down and die.

  He threw himself forward, staying low. He roped his arms out, catching the creature’s legs and powering through. Unable to stand against Delroy’s assault, it went down. Moving quickly, his breath coming harsh as a blacksmith’s bellows, Delroy scrambled up and straddled it. He beat the thing with his fists, driving punches home to its head, working into the same kind of rhythm he’d used in boxing. A human opponent would never have survived the brutal attack.

  The creature appeared dazed, but its head was impossibly hard.

  Delroy felt certain he was going to break both his hands and not have anything to show for his efforts. Despite his best punches, the creature didn’t show any bruising or split flesh.

  Then it twisted beneath him, throwing Delroy up and forward, shrugging out from under his greater weight. Gasping for air, Delroy struggled to get to his feet and made it on his second attempt. The evil thing was already up. It kicked him full in the face.

  Caught off guard, Delroy felt an explosion of pain fill his head. He whipped backward. Salty blood from his split lips coated his teeth. He went down. Immediately, he rolled to his side and tried to push himself up. Before he got to his feet, the creature kicked him in the back and sent him forward.

  The yawning grave lay before him.

  “You’re not finished yet, Preacher,” the thing roared. “You’ve got a job you’ve left undone here tonight.”

  Delroy pushed against the earth as he tried to rise. The muddy earth caused his hands to slip. Before he could fall against the ground, the thing caught him by the neck of his slicker and yanked him upward. For a moment, Delroy believed the thing had crushed his windpipe and he was going to suffocate. Then he drew in a long breath.

  The thing turned him in its impossibly strong grip. Face-to-face, Delroy felt its hot, fetid breath against his battered face. A sour stench filled the chaplain’s nostrils. In that moment, he recognized the stench. When he’d visited a congregation member who had worked in a meatpacking factory, the same smell had filled the killing-room floor. Lightning flared and stripped away some of the creature’s human appearance.

  “I came a long way to find you,” the creature said. “There are other things I could have been doing.”

  Delroy found the strength to throw a punch that caught the creature in the jaw. Even hanging loose by his opponent’s grip and not properly braced, the punch had enough force to turn its head.

  The creature cursed, then turned back to look at Delroy with blazing amber eyes. “You’re a stupid man.”

  “I beat you,” Delroy wheezed. “Back in Washington, I beat you.” The thing grinned. “You think so?”

  Delroy’s sense of victory melted.

  “Do you think we really wanted the people left behind to launch a full-scale nuclear attack?” The thing shook its head slowly. “The people left behind are ours to torture and play with. We’re going to break them, and we’re going to turn them away from that precious God of yours. We’re going to teach them that God never cared for any of them. Just as I’m teaching you tonight.”

  Delroy swept his left arm up, then turned abruptly to the right and brought it down. The martial arts move broke the creature’s grip on him. He staggered back and lifted his hands as he slipped into a boxer’s stance.

  The thing slapped Delroy’s defenses away as though he were a child. It grabbed the front of his slicker and flung him toward the yawning mouth of the grave thirty yards away.

  Propelled by inhuman force, Delroy flew twenty yards through the air, then bounced across the muddy ground like a stone skipping water. His breath left his lungs in a rush. Still, he tried to get up. The creature met him with a kick that drove him back to the grave’s edge. Hammered backwards, Delroy fell. He tried in vain to get up. There was no strength left in him.

  “C’mon, Preacher,” the thing snarled. “Time to open the box.”

  “No.” Delroy said defiantly.

  The evil creature leaned down at him, tilting its head from side to side. “I’ll kill you.” It unfurled its hands. The lightning stripped away the look of human fingers, revealing the lizard’s claws that lurked beneath. “Then kill me,” Delroy whispered.

  It pressed its face next to his. The nose slits flared. “You’re afraid. I smell it on you.”

  Delroy didn’t bother to deny the accusation.

  “I won’t kill you,” the thing said. “I want you to know the truth. Once you know the truth, you can set the record straight about your God.” It reached for him.

  Delroy tried to fight, but he was too weak, too hurt, and too afraid. It seized the front of his slicker and lifted him bodily from the ground. Almost casually, it threw him into the grave.

  He fell into the pool of water, now three inches deep. The brackish taste of mud mixed with the salty flavor of blood in his mouth. His nose swelled and one eye nearly closed. He flung himself to one side, watching in terror as the thing followed him into the grave.

  “Dig,” the creature commanded. “Use your hands.”

  “No.” Delroy glared at it but didn’t try to say anything more because he knew his voice would break.

  “I’ll bury you in here,” the thing warned. “Do you want to die?”

  Delroy truly didn’t know the answer to that question. Everything had come home to him these past three days. In the Bible, Jesus had been reborn in three days, walking from the tomb after His death on the cross to the astonishment of even His disciples.

  No one had believed in Him.

  Delroy tried to put himself back into his father’s Sunday school class. He tried to remember how safe he had felt on those mornings while listening to his father tell stories about creation, about Noah and the ark, and the parting of the Red Sea. God had been so real in those stories, so near. And now, well, now God seemed a million miles away.

  The creature screamed in inarticulate rage. As easily as Delroy would turn a child over, the creature flipped him facedown into the muddy water and put a knee into his back. Delroy was so tall his legs stuck out of the grave, but his face was under water. He tried to lift his head clear. The creature grabbed the back of his head, wrapping impossibly long fingers around his skull. Claws pricked Delroy’s flesh. The thing forced his face more deeply into the water.

  “I’m going to drown you, Preacher, if you don’t dig up this grave.”

  Delroy struggled, but the muddy sides of the grave gave way every time he tried to use them to lever himself up from the water. His head pounded and his lungs burned from the lack of oxygen. The foul water burned his eyes. He gasped reflexively and bubbles escaped his mouth.

  Just as he was about to give in and take a breath, the creature pulled his face clear of the water. His chin remained immersed.

  “Dig,” the creature ordered.

  Delroy thought hard, wondering why the creature was going to such lengths to make him cooperate. It could easily kill him. Why was exhuming Terrence’s coffin so important to it? And why didn’t the creature dig it up itself?

  The thing shoved his face back into the water. Again, just
when he was about to start drowning, his opponent lifted his face clear.

  “Give it up, Preacher. Your faith is misplaced. I’m teaching you the only things you need to believe in right now. Dig up the coffin and know the nature of all the lies that have been told to you.”

  Delroy didn’t speak. He concentrated his efforts on drawing air into his lungs. The thing shoved his face back into the water a third time. This time when it pulled him up, Delroy was choking and spluttering on water he’d sucked in.

  “You’re a fool, Preacher. Too stupid to even be afraid.”

  Lacking the strength to argue or even aid in his own salvation from the water, Delroy hung in the thing’s grip. He wanted to pray, but he didn’t believe anything he had to say would ever reach God’s ears. He’d been abandoned in the cemetery.

  Suddenly the weight of the creature was gone from his back. For a moment Delroy believed he’d just started slipping into unconsciousness and was less aware of his surroundings as a result. Weakly, arms trembling from the effort, he pushed himself up from the water. He sucked in a breath, looking over his shoulder as lightning ripped through the dark heavens.

  The creature was gone.

  Suspicious that the thing’s disappearance was a trick, Delroy waited, taking a moment to recharge his lungs with air. He lacked the reserves of strength to move quickly. In fact, he didn’t know if he would be able to move at all for a while.

  He didn’t know what had happened to the thing. It had disappeared back in Washington, too. But someone had seen the creature then. He wondered if it lacked the power to appear to anyone else. But no one else was around.

  God—?

  The possibility surfaced in Delroy’s frenzied thoughts an instant before he felt something move in the earth between his two braced hands. Instinctively, he glanced down.

  A black-taloned hand shot out of the mud in front of Delroy’s face. Adrenaline slammed through his system anew, filling him with the strength to pull back. However, before he could get away, the hand reached past him and cupped the back of his neck.

  The creature’s face surfaced in the water pooled in the grave. Predatory cat’s eyes gleamed amber in the flashlight beam. Fangs filled the thin-lipped mouth. Unable to move with the hand holding the back of his head, Delroy watched in horror as the creature glared up at him.

  “Now,” the thing growled, “now you’re going to see what’s below.” The creature yanked Delroy’s head down again. This time it didn’t stop with just putting his face into the water. The creature dragged Delroy’s head and shoulders deep into the rain-drenched mire.

  Delroy felt the cold mud all around him. Then he touched the smooth metal surface of Terrence’s coffin. He couldn’t see anything, including the monster that dragged him through the dirt, but he smelled the damp earth. Thunder cannonaded, sounding more distant because he was inside the earth instead of above it. Then a glow filled the coffin and he saw Terrence through the metal wall.

  Delroy’s mind told him there was no way he saw what he saw, but his eyes took in the stark image of his son lying in the coffin. God, why have You forsaken me?

  “He didn’t make it to the party,” the creature whispered into Delroy’s ear. “Everything you were afraid of—that your son didn’t find his belief, that you weren’t as good a preacher as you believed yourself to be all those years ago—it’s all true.”

  Terrence’s body showed the ravages of the horrible wounds that had taken his life. No amount of mortician’s wax could cover the grievous burns that covered his body, or the bullet holes that had left his face shattered and inhuman. His left arm was missing.

  Delroy tried to scream but couldn’t. No one had told them that Terrence hadn’t come back whole, only that his wounds had rendered viewing impossible.

  “The military didn’t tell you,” the thing hissed in Delroy’s ear.

  “Didn’t get all the parts back. Couldn’t find them.”

  Delroy wanted to escape but couldn’t.

  “What is that, Preacher? When someone willingly doesn’t tell you something they know you would want to know? Lying by omission, right?”

  Horror gripped Delroy as fiercely as the creature that held him.

  “But it gets even worse,” the thing said gleefully. “Your son came back missing a few parts and he didn’t make it to heaven, but the worst thing of all is that he knows he’s lying in his grave.”

  Even as the creature’s words registered in Delroy’s mind, mixing with his silent screams, Terrence opened his left eye. The other eye was a burned-out pit.

  “Dad?” Terrence croaked. He tried to rise but could only move a few inches. “Dad!” His ruined face filled with panic. “Dad, get me out of here!” He pounded his fist against the top of the coffin. The rapidfire thumps filled Delroy’s ears. “Dad! Dad, help me!”

  “Are you going to leave him there?” the creature asked over Terrence’s screams. “Are you going to leave him trapped, Preacher? Or are you going to free him?”

  In the next instant the light inside the coffin dimmed. Delroy felt water and mud all around his face. He arched his back and rose, lifting his face clear of the water pooled at the bottom of the grave.

  His breath came back to him in a rush. Terrified, he pushed himself out of the grave, swinging his body around and grabbing for the flashlight that remained at the grave’s edge. Mud caked his face and burned one eye.

  He aimed the flashlight at the bottom of the hole where the creature had pulled him under. The beam reflected in the dark water that shimmied as it settled. There was no hole like he thought there would be.

  “That’s impossible,” Delroy said, hoping that it truly was. Still, he couldn’t shut out the vision of Terrence trapped in the coffin under the muddy earth.

  “Are you going to leave him trapped, Preacher?” The creature’s words taunted Delroy, even from his memory.

  The creature was gone. Or at least it was in hiding for now.

  Delroy listened. He heard pounding, but he told himself that it was his heart, not his dead son’s fist slamming against the coffin top.

  Breathing hoarsely, unable to calm down, Delroy played his beam over the cemetery grounds and spotted the shovel where he had dropped it during the fight with the creature. On his third attempt, Delroy got his feet under him and lurched out of the hole. He grabbed the shovel and headed back to the grave. He started to clamber back down, unnerved by everything he had experienced.

  “Son.”

  Delroy heard his father’s voice. He froze and looked at his father’s grave. He’s not there. If anybody made it to heaven, my daddy did. That was just the wind. That’s all. Just the wind. He returned his attention to Terrence’s grave. The image of his dead son—wounded, God, he’s only wounded—trapped in his grave filled Delroy’s mind. He felt compelled to start digging. He lifted the shovel.

  “One thing you always gotta remember, Son. Satan, why, he was made for lyin’. He’s got his powers, terrible powers to do many things, but none of ‘em are as strong as his lies. Because when Satan lies to you, it’s gonna be when you most want to believe him. Nothin’ he’s gonna tell you ever gonna be the truth. See, he weaves lies outta your own hopes, fears, an’ dreams, outta what you think you saw an’ what you think you want to see. That’s how he works. That’s how he always works.”

  The words weren’t new. Delroy remembered them from a conversation he’d had with his father when he was nine.

  Delroy made himself look at the grave and reason things through.

  There’s no way Terrence is down there. I know my son. He was a good boy. He went to church and he honored the Ten Commandments. But at the same time he realized that Terrence might not have been a true believer. No man could ever really know another’s heart.

  Captain Mark Falkirk’s warning about “pretty good Christians,” people who led good lives but still didn’t challenge themselves to fully trust and believe, echoed inside Delroy’s head. Was that what Terrence had been? A pr
etty good Christian? Was that what Delroy had been, too? What happened to those who died without ever truly believing, when God raptured the world? Were they left behind like Delroy, but remained dead and buried deep in the cold, hard ground?

  Delroy’s heart ached. He didn’t know, and that was the worst of it.

  No, he amended quickly as the rain continued to fall from the black sky, the worst of it would be if Terrence really was trapped down there. He closed his eyes, feeling the pain that throbbed through his body from the beating he’d taken. He fully expected the creature to return and finish what it had started.

  But it didn’t.

  Weary and scared, feeling bereft and abandoned, Delroy dropped to his knees at the foot of his son’s grave with the shovel in his fists.

  He bent his head to shield his face from the cold rain and told himself he was going to pray. Only he couldn’t find the words.

  He knelt in the night only a few feet from where his child lay buried and reminded himself over and over again that the thumps hammering his eardrums were his heartbeats and not the sound of his son’s fist striking the coffin lid.

  12

  United States of America

  Fort Benning, Georgia

  Local Time 2234 Hours

  Megan sat in the hospital waiting room between two MPs that Corporal Kerby had assigned to accompany her after they had left the Hollister home. Kerby hadn’t said that she was under arrest, but the way the MPs offered to get her coffee from the break area and followed her to the bathroom, dealing with the uncomfortable situation of her doing something they couldn’t do for her in a place they couldn’t go by standing guard over the ladies’ loo, made it clear that though she wasn’t technically under arrest she was at least being closely supervised.

  She didn’t let the presence of the two young MPs bother her. Other MPs stood guard in the base hospital so she felt she almost blended in. The disappearances brought out full-blown cases of panic and paranoia as the people left behind tried to figure out what they were supposed to do. A quartet of young men sat quietly talking, each of them with a Bible in hand. One of the major concerns everyone had was that the disappearances would start again, maybe taking just as many people.