by Rob Mclean
He wrapped his arms tighter around her and held her as close as he could. Her hips pressed against his and he felt his body responding to their intimacy. He wanted her and by the way she was kissing him, pouring her energies into him, he knew that she wanted him too.
His rational mind told him that it was okay; that it was just a dream and that it was as she had said; that the chastity vow they had was different here. There was no harm in it. It wasn’t as though any of it was real, was it?
Despite his rationalisations and his gnawing desires, a small voice at the back of his consciousness calmly and quietly spoke of danger.
He broke off their embrace. A look he took to be lust filled Angela’s face, but in a heartbeat, her alluring smile twisted slightly but unmistakably to show a mixture of contempt and triumph. As she changed back to her true form, he saw that she was pleased with herself at having overcome his resolve, as if she had found his weakness.
‘She’s testing you again.’ His father’s voice confirmed his observations.
John held her at arm’s length. He saw that the front of his body was glowing where it had been pressed against hers. His luminance was rapidly fading as he watched. In contrast, the parts where she had been in contact with him were dulled but steadily brightening, returning to their customary golden glow.
A sparkling glint coming from his left hand caught John’s attention. He held up his hand and saw that the purity ring he wore was still shining with the golden glow. He turned his hand about, examining the ring from different angles. Its glow faded a bit, as the energies stabilised in both his and the woman’s bodies returned to normal. It was left with a residual warm radiance. He could feel the power that flowed within it and knew it was but a fraction of the energies that the guardian angel could summon.
John saw that she was watching him. He took her hand and saw that she had no matching ring on her finger. “You’re not Angela.” He dropped her hand and turned away, feeling angry at having been deceived. “Angela wouldn’t have tricked me like that.”
The woman in yellow threw back her head and shrieked a piercing sour laugh that sliced through the darkness. “Wouldn’t she?” Her voice was heavy with derision. She cast a glow over the slumbering lizard. “How do you think this thing came to be here in the first place?”
John shrugged. She stared at him, challenging him to think more about it. He searched her face for a clue, but no answer came.
“She let this beast in.” She stabbed an accusatory finger at the lizard.
“So?” John didn’t understand the significance. “Can’t you get rid of it? You with all your super-powers, it should be a cinch.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” she snapped, pointing at the creature. “She let it in. She gave it permission to be here. As I am her and she is me, I can’t go against her wishes.”
John shook his head in confusion. “Look, I don’t understand much of this, but if Angela needs this lizard thing gone, then I’m on it.”
He took off his shirt and holding it in both hands, readied himself. His plan was to wrap his shirt around the creature’s snout and drag it out by its tail. “How about you give us a bit of light over here Goldilocks?”
Her eyes narrowed, but the woman in yellow put her hands above her head and a brilliant white light erupted from her, dazzling in its intensity. John had to look away, as did the lizard creature. The light that fell on the obsidian scales died. It was sucked into the creature’s black nothingness, but its eyes blinked and watered and it turned its head away.
John saw it was his chance. He rushed forward and with a quick swirl, he had his shirt wrapped around the creature’s snout before it realised what was happening. He tied the long sleeves securely in double knots and was feeling quite happy with himself when he felt a sharp crack across his back.
“Stop it,” the old woman cried. She was waving a mannequin arm about, readying herself for another swing. “Leave him alone. This is his rightful place.”
John ducked backwards to avoid her swipe. He looked to the woman in yellow for help or at least some clue as to what to do about the old woman. He briefly thought about pushing the old woman away, but he didn’t feel it would be right and a terse shake of her head from the woman in yellow confirmed it. He figured that he’d just have to put up with the old woman’s protests.
“Hurry lad.” The old soldier urged him on from the open archway. “He’s starting to stir.”
The beast waved its head from side to side, trying to remove the irritation. It stood on its four taloned legs and shook itself like a wet dog, but the binding around its snout held.
John sidled around behind the creature. It now stood on its two hind legs, supported by the tail that swished about in agitation. The creature bowed its head. Its forearms raked at the bindings and John saw that it wouldn’t be long before they would be torn away. The old woman reached up to try to help the beast get the binding off, but with a shake of its head, it sent her sprawling across the floor.
John stomped on the slithering tail, then grabbed it with both hands and pulled the beast towards the archway.
“That’s it lad.” The old soldier called encouragement. “Hurry now.”
The lizard slid backwards under John’s effort, but then extended its claws and dug into the ground. With a twist of its head, it searched to see who was being foolish enough to antagonise him. When it saw John, it let forth a muffled shriek of rage that reverberated throughout the cavern. To John, the echo resounded for far too long. It rang in his head and seemed to be coming from all around.
John gathered up the tail, pulling himself closer to the lizard, until he was close enough to kick the beast behind its knee. To his satisfaction, the creature fell to its side and he was able to drag it a few more metres towards the archway.
“Hurry lad, hurry. They’re coming.” The old soldier was peering up into the darkness. “I can hear them coming.”
All John could hear was the blood pounding in his ears and outraged screeching of the lizard. To his horror, John saw flames erupt from the nostrils of the beast. Twin jets of flame fanned about in a wild erratic arc as the creature tried to turn its head to face John.
“Oh shit,” John muttered as he rolled out of the way of the oily fireball. He let go of the tail and scrambled to his feet. The beast now stood between John and the archway. It spun its head about, looking for the intruder and it was then that John could hear answering shrieks rising from the darkness all about him.
“Run for it,” the old soldier yelled before he disappeared out the archway. John looked about. The old woman had abandoned her cart and was shuffling away as fast as she could. The woman in yellow had vanished, her golden glow gone. Her light was replaced by a growing ring of greasy fireballs as more of the lizard creatures heeded to their master’s war-cry.
John took one last look at the lizard creature. As it stood on its hind-legs, a pair of leathery, bat-like wings unfurled. With a vicious flap, the wings extended to fill John’s vision. The creature grew before John’s eyes, doubling in size. Unable to drag his eyes away, John watched his shirt rip and fall away from the snout. A huge set of jaws opened and issued a ground shaking roar.
John turned and tried to run. His legs felt heavy, leaden and unable to move fast enough. His feet felt as if they were glued to the floor, but with effort, they gradually moved. His goal was to make for the stairway he had come in from.
The ground lit up to his left as an orange fireball rolled past alongside him, marking its passage with an oily fire trail on the ground. His legs moved like an old steam train pulling away from the station, starting slowly and gradually gathering speed. He expected to be engulfed in a firestorm any moment. He zig-zagged as he ran, hoping to evade the inevitable fireball.
By now his legs were pumping furiously. He took a chance and jumped over the burning trail, avoiding a second fireball further to the right where he would have been.
Behind him he heard a frustrated roar.
This brought a quick grin to John’s face and a moment of reprieve. He knew that the creature couldn’t roar and breathe fire at the same time. John hoped to keep surviving by out-guessing and frustrating the creature.
He jumped back over the first fireball trail, but then saw that he now was running between two blazing lines of fire. With a hurried look over his shoulder, John saw that the dragon creature had grown even larger. It lumbered, Godzilla like on its hind legs in no apparent hurry to incinerate its victim. Behind the monster, dozens of similar, smaller flying lizard creatures had arrived. They hissed and wailed in support of their master.
John ignored them and concentrated instead on the beacon of yellow light spilling from the stairway only metres ahead that signalled his escape. The ground shook. John didn’t have to look behind to know that the beast was stomping towards him and that he wasn’t bellowing anymore.
John reached the wall of the cavern. The small alcove that led to the winding stairway glowed with a golden light. As soon as John was inside, he saw the woman in yellow further up the stairs.
“Let’s go Goldilocks.” John threw a look over his shoulder to see the dragon rearing up just outside the alcove. He made to run up the stairs, but the woman held up her hand. A golden energy made the air between them opaque.
“You have failed me,” she said. Her voice faded as the energy barrier between them solidified.
“Aw, come on. You’ve gotta be kidding me.” John slammed his fist into the energy barrier. It had coalesced into solidity and was indistinguishable from the rest of the alcove wall. “That’s just not fair.”
Behind him, John heard the bubbling, spitting whoosh of the oily fireball before he turned to see it. A huge orange and black eruption of fiery death rushed towards him. All he could do was to put up his arms to shield himself.
He expected to feel the flames crush about him, but from his left hand, a golden shield had formed. Made from the same opaque energy, it had sprung into existence from his brightly glowing ring and deflected the flames.
The dragon bellowed with frustration again. It gave him the chance to study the shield and the ring. Part of his mind tried to work it out. Did his love for Angela power the ring, or was it just left-over energy from her guardian angel? But weren’t they the same people anyway? Whatever caused the shield to appear, it didn’t matter. The shield was only an old, medieval-style, round, wooden shield. From the blackened surface, he could tell that it wouldn’t last another onslaught from the dragon’s flames. He needed it to be bigger; one of the modern, light-weight carbon-fibre anti-riot shields that he used at work, if he was to stand any chance.
He stared at the shield, willing it to change, but it obstinately remained the same.
“Come on,” he growled at the shield, shaking it about, trying to make it bigger. Directly in front, he saw the dragon readying itself for another blast of fire.
John tapped on the ring, as if its batteries were low and he might get some more power from it, but it was no good. It didn’t grow. If anything, he thought the shield now looked smaller.
“Have faith,” his father’s voice sounded in his ears.
“Faith?” John asked as the fireball sped towards him. “Faith in what?”
The shield dissolved as the flames swirled about him. He briefly writhed about, anticipating a searing, blistering pain, but he woke before it came.
“Dammit,” He muttered to himself as he opened his eyes. He felt angry and disappointed, as though he had lost a rigged card game. Despite the night’s sleep, he had woken feeling exhausted and drained. He rolled over and tried to get back to sleep, but it eluded him.
In his mind, he went over the events in his dream. “Double dammit,” he said to his empty bedroom. “I should have run out the archway, not gone back up the stairs.” But as he fingered his cold, dull purity ring, the question still hung in his mind. “Faith in what?”
Chapter 6
A harsh bright light brought Akil back to the world of pain. He blinked repeatedly as his eyes tried to adjust. He tried to lift his arm to shield his eyes, but he was too weak. It flopped back to the ground and he lay on his back and waited for his eyes to cope.
It was a long time before his eyes worked properly and he was able to turn his head to look around. The afternoon sun had chased away some of the shadows that had shaded him earlier. It now bore down on his head through a thin covering of grey clouds that did little to reduce its ferocity. He could feel the skin on his face starting to burn and he knew that he had to move before his whole body was exposed to the furnace overhead.
His tongue had swollen and filled his tacky, dry mouth. It felt as if he had slept with his mouth open the whole time and that the ashen dust that coated everything around him had filled it. No amount of swallowing helped to slacken his raging thirst.
Thankfully, the smells that had drawn him to this place had abated. He doubted that the nearby bloated corpse smelt any less, rather his sense of smell had either gotten used to it, or wasn’t working properly because of his dehydration. Whatever the cause, he was grateful for that small mercy.
Sounds of distant choppers gave him some hope. Firstly that the rescue operation was still going and secondly that his hearing hadn’t been permanently damaged by the blast that had flattened everything. He tried to work out how long it had been since his city had been destroyed, but with all the time he had spent unconscious, he couldn’t tell.
Normally he would be ravenously hungry after a day or more without food, but the thirst over-rode everything. The thought of food made him realise how queasy he felt. The more he tried to put it out of his mind, the worse he felt.
“Oh Allah,” he said in the quietest of voices, part in a prayer for help and part in sad resignation, when he knew beyond all doubt that he was going to be sick again. He managed to turn his head to the side before his body convulsed in a series of spasms. Purging and cleansing, he told himself as his body jerked out its contents uncontrollably.
He was mindful to try to use the involuntary vomiting movement to rock his body out of the sunlight, toward the shade. He knew that it would be harder for the rescuers to find him in the dark corners, but he would live longer out of the burning sun.
Many times his body heaved out his precious fluids until, shaking and delirious, at last the torment had passed. He lay in a dazed blur, but found himself at the bottom of a pile of rubble, out of the sun and tucked against the remains of a low wall. A weak smile crossed his face and he sent out a prayer of thanks. It was as good an outcome as he could have hoped for. He would be out of the sun for almost all of the day.
After the shaking had passed, he found that he felt a bit better. He managed to wipe the dust from his eyes and brush the hair from his face. To his dismay he saw that his hands were full of his dark hair. It clung between his bloodied fingers in thick clumps. He stared at the handfuls of hair, unable to work out what had caused it to fall out.
The explanation eluded him, but at least it did not cause him any pain. As he wondered about this, he looked around and he saw that the rubble and the wall were smeared with blood. His thoughts moved slowly, the world about him spun. Where was the blood coming from? Was there yet another corpse nearby? He stared at it closely. It was fresh blood, still liquid, running down the wall to form sticky pools amid the dust.
As he stared at the bright red rivulets, he finally realised that it was his own blood, his very life-blood that had betrayed him and abandoned his sick body.
A single, quiet sigh passed his parched lips as he gave up his struggle. He would have wept if he could, for all the futures he would never have known; the fame and wealth that would have followed, the devoted wife and the beautiful children he would never have. All banished to non-existence now that he knew that his short life was dwindling to an end. He sent out a prayer to Allah to receive his soul for he knew that very soon he was going to die.
Chapter 7
Angela was pleasantly surprised that John had v
olunteered to come to church again with her family. She began to let herself hope that maybe there was a slight chance that he might become a Christian after all, despite what his horrid mother would think.
While it would help with her own mother’s attitude towards keeping company with John, she knew that it would only make things harder if Zeke ever decided to grow up and treat her as a man should. She quickly dismissed that thought as it was such a remote possibility. She slipped his arm around his waist and hugged him as he pushed her father’s wheelchair. She felt an effervescent kind of bliss in her chest as he smiled back at her.
As before, they had arrived early to avoid the crush of the crowds that her father had predicted. John had driven them in his dented car, but no-one discussed the cause of the damage during the drive.
At the front door, Pastor Greg looked tired as he greeted his parishioners. Angela could tell by his slow movements and his glazed expression. It looked as though his thoughts were a long way from his congregation today.
People filed in to Church ahead of Angela and her family. She overheard them comment as the Pastor greeted them, on his haggard, faded appearance. Some were diplomatic and tactful, but her mother said in a voice that was loud enough to turn heads that, “The poor man looks like death, warmed-over.”
Angela tried to hush her, but she waved her away and then asked at the same volume as they inched their way forward, “and why are there so many people here? It doesn’t take this long to be seated normally.”
Today’s gathering was the biggest she could remember in all her long attendance. Everyone who had ever come to this church had decided to come along today with many others she had never seen before.
“Crisis Christians,” her mother sneered in the same piercing whisper as if reading her thoughts.
Angela hoped that they were all here to find Salvation through the Pastor’s words and ministrations, but she suspected that the threat of annihilation from an alien counter-attack and the possibility of their imminent deaths had a lot to do with the real reason for their attendance.
