A Guardian of Innocents (33 page)

All I could make out were two bloody patches on the floor. I didn’t understand his apprehension until it dawned on me one of the pools of congealing blood had belonged to Aaron’s father, and the other...

A gurgling voice addressed me from just behind my neck, “Jeshuaaaa-ah. . .”  

Not even bothering to look behind me, I leapt out into the black void, feeling for the stairs. Outside, the thunderstorm snapped a brief sliver of light into the building which illuminated the staircase for just about a third of a second.

But then a hand clamped its grip upon the collar of my jacket and pulled me down hard onto the metal grating of the catwalk.

Aaron’s footfalls clanged on the steps as he raced back up the stairway, but then I heard something awful. I didn’t need any light to show me what was happening. The staircase popped and screeched like a choir of outraged banshees as it was wrenched free of the catwalk, as though pried loose by a cyclone.

With a series of lightning strikes outside I was able to glimpse a few succinct images of the metal stairway being wrung like a wet rag, then bent into an arch until the top platform touched the floor thirty or forty yards away from the base.

Furious, Aaron howled as he realized he was pinned inside. Whether he had vampiric strength still left within him or not, freeing himself was impossible. His arms were bound to his sides, with his legs given little room to move. The butt of his AK was pressing intrusively into his stomach.

I’m not going out like this
, I told myself as I leapt to my feet, swinging my fists wildly in the dark at a man who seemed to be composed of nothing but silhouettes. My punches were as useless as ever. Godwin stood as rigid and impervious as on the night of 9/11.

I hit the side of his head and something jagged cut into my knuckles. I knew (feeling sickened) that I’d cut my hand on the shards of his broken skull.

And why at that moment did the power from the factory’s emergency generator have to kick in? The image of that face still haunts my nightmares, though they are fewer now. Whatever alternating strobe program Louis had the lights set on had now been deactivated, but only dim lights, scattered in a checkered pattern along the ceiling, were now lit.

The Creeper glowered down at me with his one good eye as he hovered, his feet just inches above the charcoal gray mesh of the catwalk. His white teeth flashed in the weak lighting as he grinned at me.

“I have to thank you,” he hissed as blood and some kind of yellowish fluid trickled from his vacant eye socket, “Until now, I have always wondered if it were really possible. If I was truly immortal. But now my doubts, those nagging little voices that they are, have been eradicated.”

“Aaron!” I heard Richard shout.

“I’m in here!” his son responded from somewhere beneath me.

I turned my head, about to call for help, when a shiny, slightly curved blade planted itself into my left shoulder and a foot kicked me in the sternum. I fell onto my back, unable to breathe. An invisible hand was choking me.

Fuck that. It was more like an invisible python.  

“I’ll offer you my gift again, Jeshua. But this is the last and final time. Do you want to die?”

He yanked the short Japanese sword out of my flesh. My eyes clamped shut with hot pain as blood began to saturate my shirt, making it stick to my skin. He put both of the blades to my neck as he stood over me, holding then in an X like a pair of shears. The constriction of my throat stopped and I inhaled great gulps of air, hyperventilating.

“So what say you, Jeshua? Die now or live forever?”

In a desperate, defiant attempt to live, I reached inside my jacket and produced the cross I’d been carrying with me. I shoved it between his arms, up towards his face.

Godwin stared at it thoughtfully for a moment, then laughed gently, “Did you really think that would have any effect on me? You’re an atheist, Jeshua. You lack the faith to back that thing up. You might as well be pointing an unloaded gun at me!”

Still chuckling, he placed one of the blades in his teeth, and with his now free hand, snatched the crucifix and chucked it over his shoulder behind him. Still holding the sword in his left hand to my neck, he retrieved its twin back from his mouth and twirled it by the hilt with his fingers once for show then lifted it, point down, high above his head as if ready to impale me.

But then the corner of his mouth twitched with a distracted sneer of uncertainty. It dawned on me then that I
hadn’t
heard that cross clang against anything. It should have fallen somewhere, hit something.

Louis Godwin turned around. And as he stepped aside, there was Tessa standing at the other end of the catwalk. The cross was in her hand. She held it out before her with a straight arm like a shield.

How’d she get up here?
I thought to myself.  

Until this point, I hadn’t paid any real attention to the buzzing noise created by Godwin’s presence because I’d simply gotten used to it. But now I noticed a severe drop in its volume. It had gone from a chainsaw to a kitchen blender in 0.2 seconds.

He was afraid.

“Tessa! Darling angel. Throw that thing away and come here. Come over here to me, Tessa.”

“No,” she whispered, her voice hoarse and dry.

Louis had his back turned to me and seemed to have all but completely forgotten that I existed. I got to my feet, biting down on my lower lip from the pain in my shoulder. I braced myself with my right hand upon the rail of the catwalk and kicked upward, hard as I could.

One of the steel toes of my trusty Doc Martens popped one of the sword’s hilts out of Louis’ grip.

Facing me with his one glaring eye, he growled, “Son of a bitch!” and swung at me with his other sword. I fell backwards, fastball-dodging style, almost losing my nose as the blade sliced the air in front of my face.

“Get away from him!” Tessa screamed, “In Jesus name, I command it!”

Godwin fell to his hands and knees as though shoved from behind as I scrambled back up to my own crawling position to get away from him. But he immediately got one foot beneath him and lunged at me a second time. I dodged his attack gracelessly by falling over again towards my right, rolling my way towards Tessa.

Godwin staggered towards me in pursuit, but his speed was diminished, almost sluggish. He managed to stand upright again and was almost on me when Tessa shouted, “In Jesus name, get
BACK!!!
”

Louis flew back about five yards or more as though he’d been sucker punched by a wrecking ball.

“You little bitch!” he howled. He stood up again, now a safe distance away from us.

“Come over here, Jeshua! Get behind me!” Tessa ordered.

I got to my feet and walked over to her like a hunchback; the pain in my shoulder was so excruciating. She came the rest of the way over to me when I tripped and fell onto my left side, which shot a fresh lightning bolt of pain through my upper body. I knew I hadn’t tripped of my own clumsiness. Godwin smiled at me like Dr. Lecter from his jail cell.

Tessa knelt beside me, laying her free hand upon my shoulder. It went numb, as though shot with a local anesthetic. I could feel the wound still there, still bleeding, but she had reduced the pain to a dull ache.

“Tessa!” Richard’s frantic voice called out below, “Tessa, where are you?”

“She’s up here with me, sir!” Louis shouted, “But don’t worry. I’m taking good care of her!”

“Son of a whore!” Collins yelped, the fear in his voice more present than his anger or shock. I understood his feelings perfectly.

“Yes, I’ll take good care of you, Tessa,” Godwin said, “Just like all the men I’ve sent you to over the years. They all took good care of you, didn’t they? And you enjoyed them. You enjoyed all those hundreds of cocks inside you, my little prize cunt. I know you did!”

I felt anger, shame and humiliation welling up within her. She hated him more passionately than I thought I could have ever hated Jack.

In that instant, I realized Godwin wasn’t simply taunting out of cruelty. It was tactical. He was slowly walking towards us. The angrier she became, the more her power over him weakened.

“Tessa, don’t listen to him!” I told her, “Block it out! Don’t let him win!”

I pulled the Beretta out of my jacket pocket and blasted two rounds at him, which he dodged effortlessly. With one foot after another, he continued his approach.

But the gunfire seemed to clear Tessa’s head. “In Jesus name get away from us!”

Godwin stayed his ground, leaning forward as though he was being upheld by an updraft of air. A grimace of pain passed over his face.

“You have no idea how powerful my Lord Salyssi is, little girl,” he hissed.

“I’m sick of listening to you!” she whispered, then clamping her eyes shut, she lowered her voice and proclaimed, “In the name of the Son of God Jesus Christ who died on the cross for the sins all who live, have lived or ever will live, I command you to
LEAVE NOW!!!”

Godwin slid backwards as he continued to lean forward, as though driven back by a fierce gale of wind. His face contorted and twisted with pain.

“You’ll never be rid of me, little girl!” Godwin snarled, “I’ll see you in your fucking grave!”

Tessa stood with my cross out before her with a proverbial fire in her eyes, an explicit vision of heroism. She closed her eyes again and softly prayed, “Lord, in Jesus name I come to you today in prayer...”

Louis cocked his head to one side, listening carefully as he stood upright again, now thirty or more feet away.

“...I ask you, Lord, that you help this man who threatens me...”

I looked over at her like she was insane.

“Please release this miserable wretch of his demons. Take his demons away. Now, Lord, in Jesus name I pr—“

Godwin’s jaw dropped in absolute horror.

“Nooo!!!” he squealed, “You bitch! I won’t letchoo!!!”   

He wrapped his arms around his abdomen as he doubled over and turned the other way, hacking violently as though from a bad case of dry heaves. He began to jog down the catwalk, still hunched over, at first taking long painful strides, then picking up his pace.

“IN CHRIST’S HOLY NAME!!!” Tessa shouted, continuing her intercessional assault upon him.

Godwin froze, arms bound to his sides, the fingers of his hands splayed. His body rotated 180 degrees to face us. “It won’t work, won’t work, woanwork,” he chanted, shaking his head.

“Free him, Lord,” Tessa whispered, barely audible.

“THEY’RE MINE!!!” he screeched as he arched back on his tiptoes and roared and bellowed with rage.

And though I saw nothing with my own eyes, I was able to glimpse the exiting demons through Tessa’s eyes. In her mind I saw them. Black amorphous amoebas. Floating, undulating, pulsating.

Sensing their vast rage and hatred was frightening enough, but what scared me ten times worse was that I could sense their age... their timelessness.

I looked at Godwin and our eyes met.

Suddenly, I was in another time and place. All I knew was I was frantic, seeking some form of escape from the fire... the fumes. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see. There was no way to get to the elevators. The emergency stairway was clogged with throngs of fellow co-workers. Some were crawling, trying to stay below the monstrous tendrils of black smoke.

“You motherfucker,” I gasped. Not only did I realize
where
I was, but more importantly,
who
I was.

I heard a deafening roar from above; ten thousand trains colliding into each other at once. And then nothing.

She really didn’t suffer that much, Jeshua,
Godwin thought at me. An insinuated feeling of cold, cruel laughter followed those words, though Godwin’s actual face was frozen in a snarl of pain as one demon after another was torn loose from him.

“YOU PIECE OF SHIT!!!” I howled, a bloodcry of rage and loss so intense it gave me momentary tunnel vision. I took out my gun and fired blindly at him, emptying my clip.

“Jeshua! No!” Tessa cried.

Louis sprang back into life. Every shot I’d fired had missed. The demons were pulled back into him as though he were the vortex of a whirlpool. He jumped into the air and hovered there, considering his next move. The bottom half of his black trench coat dangled limply in the still air around his legs, which were bent slightly at the knees.

His one eye scowled at me first, but then he smiled.

“Thanks,” he said. “I owe ya one.”

The Creeper took flight and hurled himself through one of the large windows, out into the rumbling gray of the thunderstorm.

I screamed in frustration as the chilled pre-winter winds from the storm spilled into the plant.

“We have to get down to Aaron!” I said to Tessa, “He’ll go after him and your father.”

“He’s not coming back,” Tessa replied calmly, “He wouldn’t dare. Now be still.”

She placed both hands on my shoulder and began praying over me in the same fashion as she had her father. A warmth ran through my arm, up my neck and into my chest. The wound itched as it closed itself. Something popped in or around the joint and the gentle warmth dissipated. Tessa stood over me, smiling.