by J. S. Bailey
He lifted his foot off the gas and allowed the car to coast a short distance, but it didn’t stop the engine’s temperature from rising. Going at this rate, he wouldn’t last another mile before the thing went kaput.
He decided it was probably a good time to start praying.
“You’ve got to give me a hand here,” he said as he pulled the car off the side of the road onto the gravel shoulder. Better to make a brief stop than to keep going and fry Phil’s car. “I know I’ve ended up in this situation for a reason, even though you don’t seem to want me to know what it is. But I can’t help Randy and Lupe if I don’t have a way to get to them. So please make the engine cool off so I can keep going.”
He suddenly perceived that words were not necessary for his prayer. He killed the engine (was that the right thing to do?) and bowed his head, sending out a wordless plea that seemed to leak from every pore of his being.
At Randy’s house, he’d had to believe he could determine where Randy and Lupe were. Now he had to believe that God would heed his request.
At once, a cold thought intruded upon his own. Go home. Get out of here. We don’t want you.
Though it terrified him to do so, Bobby forced himself to pray harder. He prayed for protection from those attempting to unnerve him. He prayed for Caleb (if his wild assumptions about his roommate were indeed correct) to stand guard over not only him but Lupe and Randy as well.
A horn blared outside the window. He jerked his head up in time to see Phil fly by in his Taurus.
Bobby silently thanked Phil for not stopping to help. That’s what the demons would want. Any attempt to delay both of them would only be for the demons’ gain.
His eyes filled with tears. “Please help me!” he cried as he felt something icy claw at his mind like the bloody talons of a beast.
He thought of his father, who seemed to have been with him for real on the imaginary beach Phil conjured in his mind. “Dad, help me! Pray that they’ll leave me alone!”
His hands clenched into fists around the steering wheel. He couldn’t let despair overtake him. Randy had freed dozens of people from the clutches of evil. Surely God himself could free Bobby without Randy’s intervention.
The knocking under the hood continued for several minutes before ceasing, but that might have just been because the engine was no longer running.
No. He had to believe. Worry and doubt were two negative forces that worked together like partners in crime to ensure that belief failed.
“The car’s going to be fine,” he whispered.
He cracked open an eyelid.
The needle on the temperature gauge crept its way back into the normal range.
Relief made his chest lighten.
He waited sixty seconds before turning the key in the ignition again.
The engine turned over with ease. He let it run for another minute to see what would happen, grateful when the knocking did not resume and the needle stayed put.
It may have been his imagination, but the air in the car suddenly felt lighter, as if a thick blanket had been flung off of him.
“God,” he said, “if you get Randy and Lupe out of this alive, I’ll do whatever you want me to do with my life. I’ll become a missionary. I’ll work at a soup kitchen. Anything. Just let them be okay.”
He was rambling like a nutcase. He was too pleased with his fortune to care.
Bobby checked for oncoming traffic and pulled back onto the winding road.
Everything would be okay.
He believed it.
PHIL MASON was a man of many flaws. He knew this. His ever-understanding wife, Allison, knew this. Randy and the rest of their “family” knew this.
And right now he despised himself for it more than anything in the world.
As a child, he had known that God would call him to do something special with the gift he had been given, but now it seemed that God was finished with him. Some Servants kept their ability once the mantle was passed on to another and some had it fade over the years like color bleaching out of an old snapshot.
Phil’s ability had faded practically into oblivion. The only things he could heal these days were paper cuts, and that was only on occasion.
Sometimes he wondered if he had unknowingly done something that made God take back the ability to heal wounds—perhaps it was punishment for Phil’s long spells of doubt following his predecessor Martin’s death. Allison assured him that God still had a plan for him, but in the darkness of night Phil would lie in bed wondering if God was nothing more than an overgrown, omnipotent child who liked to set his own toys on fire just to see what interesting things they might do as they burned.
So yes, Phil had some problems, but so did everyone to some extent. Apparently he’d been wrong to doubt the Roland kid who’d crashed into their lives like a meteor falling out of the sky. He’d been wrong plenty of times before, and this certainly wouldn’t be the last.
He prayed that Bobby wasn’t wrong about where Randy and Lupe might be found.
Route 89 was a winding road lined with the ubiquitous evergreens that populated the forests of the Pacific Northwest. When he rounded one particular curve, he saw that Bobby had pulled the Buick onto the shoulder and sat as still as a stone behind the wheel with his head down.
His heart nearly stopped. What was the kid doing? Had he run out of gas?
He wanted—no, he needed—to know why Bobby pulled off the road. But he couldn’t. There just wasn’t enough time.
To distract his thoughts from Bobby, he repeated the address of the rental house to himself. It was coming up soon—he could tell from the numbers on the mailboxes on the sparse houses he passed.
Hidden Valley Road, the place where Bobby was supposed to be headed, appeared on his left. He prayed Bobby would hurry up and get a move on so he could get there in time.
Minutes later, Phil spotted a mailbox emblazoned with the number of “David Upton’s” Route 89 address.
He turned into the driveway. The house sat back a short distance from the road. It had two floors and judging from the modern architecture looked like it had been built sometime within the past twenty years. There wasn’t a garage, but a shed shaped like a miniature brown barn with white trim sat in the back yard. The lawn had recently been cut. A few tall trees stood in the yard like sentinels keeping watch over the property. Behind the house, the southern Cascades rose up toward the sky.
It didn’t look like anyone was here. But he had to trust Bobby’s intuition. Somewhere on this property, either in the house or out, was one of Phil’s two closest friends.
His hand automatically reached for his gun. He would only use it to kill if absolutely necessary. Perhaps that was a personal flaw as well.
He climbed out of the car and approached the house with caution, wishing he hadn’t left his tote bag in Bobby’s car at Father Laubisch’s house. Knowing that harm could befall anyone at practically any given moment, he found comfort in having a full medical kit on hand in case some minor emergency arose.
Then he realized he had no real plan. His initial goal was to ascertain whether or not Randy or Lupe was really being kept prisoner here and then call the police so they could take care of the rest, but he could only do that if he went inside and scoped the place out.
He’d never been in law enforcement. His specialty was aiding patients, not sneaking into hostage situations like the biggest dunderhead on the planet. Even his little gun wouldn’t likely save his life if he suddenly came under fire.
This stank.
He started praying.
LUPE GAVE a start when she heard the crunch of gravel and the slam of a car door somewhere beyond the shed. She had gotten the blindfold off a few minutes before by repeatedly rubbing her head against the wall, but the shed had no windows, so she couldn’t see who’d just arrived.
Her heart fluttered like a songbird trapped in a cage. “Randy?” she whispered. Then, “Randy! Help me! I’m in here!” Graham and his minion were
probably there with him, but she didn’t care. “Randy!”
PHIL HAD been trying to peer into one of the first-floor windows when a muffled shout somewhere close by made the hairs lift up on the back of his neck. He couldn’t tell if it had come from within the house or not, so he held his breath and kept listening.
There. It came again. The voice was female, and it issued from somewhere to his left.
Relief flooded his veins. Lupe. He turned toward the sound of her voice and laid his gaze upon the wooden shed.
He broke into a run and arrived in front of the shed in less than ten seconds. “Lupe, it’s me,” he said, throwing a glance over his shoulder to make sure nobody was sneaking up behind him. “I’m going to get you out of here.”
Lupe spewed out a string of Spanish words that Phil didn’t understand. “Phil, you’ve got to watch out for Graham! Randy’s supposed to come here, and Graham is going to kill him!”
“I think it’s just the two of us right now,” he said, figuring now wasn’t the time to tell her that Randy wouldn’t be coming here at all. He saw that the shed door had been padlocked shut. “All right. I need you to go to the far right corner of this shed, as far away from the door as you can.”
“Why? What are you doing?”
“I’m going to shoot around the lock and get you out.”
A pause. “Your right or my right?”
“My right.” Then, just to be sure she didn’t misunderstand him in her traumatized state, he walked around the side of the small building and banged on the wall outside of where he wanted her to go. “Right here. You got that?”
He thought he heard her sniffling, and the sound of it stabbed him in the heart. If it were Allison in there instead of Lupe, he didn’t think he would have been able to keep his head long enough to do what was necessary to free her. “Yes,” she said, her voice now inches away from him.
“Good. Now stay put until I’ve got the door open.”
He returned to the front and fired one shot into the door and another into a shed wall on either side of the lock in order to weaken the integrity of the wood. Ears ringing, he gave the lock a swift kick and felt the wood start to splinter. Five more kicks, and the wood where the metal latch had been screwed into the door gave way.
Thank you, God.
He pulled the door open.
Lupe leapt up from where she’d crouched in the corner and barreled at him, looking as jubilant as a convict newly freed from a wrongful imprisonment. “My hands!” she said. “Can you untie them for me?”
She turned, and he saw that Graham had fastened her wrists together with two linked orange zip ties. “I’ve got scissors in one of the first-aid kits in my back seat,” he said. “Come on.” He started back toward the car but halted when he realized she wasn’t following. “Lupe?”
She was staring at the shed, her face lined with concern. “He tricked me,” she said in a soft voice. “He drove me out of here and took me right back so I’d think he was taking me to Randy.”
“Can we discuss this in the car? We’re running out of time.”
Wordlessly, Lupe turned from the shed and followed him to the Taurus. Phil threw open the back passenger side door, tossed aside the blanket still lying on the floor, and popped open the first kit he saw. He rummaged through rolls of gauze and withdrew the tiny medical scissors in triumph. “Here you go. Lupe?”
Lupe had stepped away from the car and was gazing uncertainly at the end of the driveway.
A car had turned off the road and was coming toward them. As it pulled up and stopped beside Phil’s Taurus, he saw that Father Laubisch sat behind the wheel.
A mixture of anger and fear coursed through him when the rogue priest climbed out and cast his gaze their way. Phil stepped in front of Lupe to protect her, tucked the scissors into his pocket, and raised his gun.
“Stop right where you are,” he said.
Father Laubisch raised his hands. He had exchanged his gardening clothes for his black priest’s garb. “Mr. Mason, please. Hear me out.”
“I don’t have time for this. I ought to shoot you right where you stand for your part in all this. Don’t look so shocked. We know.”
The priest appeared stricken. “I—I’m not collaborating with him. Far from it. The man on the porch . . . he was watching the house from the old shop across the street. He does that to make certain I don’t try to pull anything. He wanted you to know he means business.”
“Means business?” Phil gave a hollow laugh. “So he pretended to kill you so we’d be afraid of him. Makes perfect sense.”
“He’s a very bad man,” Father Laubisch said somewhat lamely. “He was going to kill me if I didn’t go along with what he wanted me to do.”
“And what about now? Did he tell you to come here and check on Lupe?”
The priest’s face darkened. “As a matter of fact, it was my full intention to let her out while the others are distracted and take her to the police station. I wasn’t aware you would be here, too.”
Phil smelled a rat. “I don’t believe a word you’ve just told me.” He kept his gun trained on the man and used his other hand to fish his cell phone out of his pocket.
“Phil,” Lupe whispered. “Aren’t you going to cut the ties off of me?”
She wasn’t going to give up, not even when a sociopathic priest stood just feet away from them. He put his phone in his pocket, gestured for Lupe to step closer, and snipped both zip ties.
She brought her hands in front of her and began rubbing one of her wrists.
Phil continued. “I’m going to call the police. I’m fairly certain I know where Graham is right now. But what I don’t know is what to do about you.”
“I’m going to hand myself over. God knows I deserve it,” Father Laubisch said in a soft tone, and left it at that.
“Good,” Phil said.
He called 911. Fortunately Randy wasn’t there to stop him.
RANDY OPENED his eyes and blinked a few times. His head felt groggy, and it was difficult to get a handle on his thoughts. Had he fallen asleep? He couldn’t remember feeling tired. Strange. The last thing he could remember was . . .
“He’s awake,” a voice said at his shoulder.
His heart skipped a beat. Randy looked down at himself and discovered that his shirt had been removed, and that somebody had strapped him to a piece of plywood canted at a forty-five degree angle with his feet near the floor. His wrists were still tied and his arms were pinned beneath him, cramping from the unnatural position.
Directly across from him sat Lupe’s motionless form.
This was not part of the plan.
Graham stood next to him holding a knife that looked as sharp as a surgical blade. The tears had vanished from his eyes.
Randy took that as a bad sign.
“I had to drug you,” Graham explained. “I didn’t think you would let Jack tie you down like this without a fight. Even a man of God like yourself will come to blows when his life is in danger.”
Randy swallowed. His tongue felt like someone coated it in sand. “How long?”
“You’ve been out for no more than ten minutes.”
It seemed longer, but such was the way of slumber.
“Now I understand that you love Lupe Sanchez very much,” the old man continued. “Am I right?”
Randy couldn’t remove his gaze from his fiancée, who was still wrapped in the cowl so tightly he couldn’t even see a glimpse of her hair or skin. He was starting to wonder if Graham had killed her already.
He nodded.
“I’m going to give you the opportunity to live. Think about that. It’s always been believed that if the Servant should die without a successor, evil will reign free in the world for the next eighteen years. Think of all the lives you’ll save if you survive. Souls will be freed. Good deeds will be done.” He paused. “Only one of you can live. You or Lupe. Lupe or you. Is saving one woman’s life worth letting Satan win?”
Randy’s b
lood ran cold. Graham was giving him an ultimatum too terrible for him to contemplate. Could he really let Graham kill Lupe if it meant he could go free? “Satan will never win.”
Graham rolled his eyes. “I was a fool when I was a younger man. I thought we would be able to help people, but take one look at the world today and tell me what you see. Murders left and right. Rape. Abortions. Shootings. War. What you do is useless. Or is it?” He smiled. “That’s for you to decide. Maybe you really are making a difference. Maybe we’ll all go to hell in a hand basket the moment you croak. I don’t know.”
Amazingly, tears sprang to the old man’s eyes again. “I loved you, Randy. You were the son I never had. Did you know? Some of my favorite times in these last few years were when we’d just sit down and talk about anything we wanted, and nobody was there to bother us. I miss that. I really do.”
Randy gaped at him. Graham was truly, literally, off his rocker.
Graham continued. “You were always so good, humoring me like you did even when I knew I was bugging you half the time. But you were too good. I . . . I don’t know. You made me remember what it was like.” He grabbed his head with one hand and took in a ragged breath. “You made me jealous.”
“Nice story, Grandpa,” Jack said from Randy’s right, “but can we get a move on?”
Graham waved a hand at him. “Let me finish. He wanted to know why, so I’m telling him. Randy, I told you I was at peace up until I met you. That was a lie. I’d only thought I was at peace. I’d listen to you praying each night. So earnest, so sincere. I remembered how it was back then, long before you were born. Feeling God’s presence as strongly as if he were a flesh-and-blood human standing there holding my hand. I wanted to die to be with him like that again. But I was afraid to die. What might happen to me now? I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
All of the possessed whom Randy had encountered during his career had visible signs that a demon tormented them. He alone could see its writhing black aura inside his mind and could literally feel the evil pouring off of them.
